CyberGuardians

So my first Blackhat is in the books. I thoroughly enjoyed it and got to learn quite a bit and get some networking done as well. My only two complaints would be first, that it was completely overcrowded on the 4th floor and that made getting to a session very difficult. The second being that classic conference paradox. A lot of the great topics with new material were presented by people with poor public presentation skills, whereas alot of the great speakers presented either old stuff or no real useful content. That aside it was a hoot. I started the week attending a Malware Analysis class by Mandiant which was excellent. They basically crammed a 4 day course into 2 days, so it moved very quick and had lots of content and labs. The teachers were extremely knowlegeable and were able to convey the material well. My only suggestion would be that they should have spent more time on Ollydbg, but with the labs I can do that on my own time. They did spend extensive time using IDAPro, whic...

In continuing my tradition of reviewing books that are 2 or 3 years old, I have recently finished reading Real Digital Forensics by Keith Jones, Richard Bejtlich, and Curtis Rose. Yeah, I hate paying full price for a new book, but mostly its because I buy so many books that by the time I get around to actually reading them, its been a few years Laughing. Now on to the review. With this group of experienced authors, it hard to imagine the book not being a success. While not spectacular, this books is very solid and fairly easy to read. I would have to say for someone looking to attend the SANS hacking and forensic courses, this book could easily fill the gap and save you thousands of dollars. One thing I really liked was that they did not waste time on any fluff chapters about the history of whatever, they just jumped right into the material. They also made it a point to show the differences between incident response on *nix vs. windows. All the chapters that focused on analysis and...

I had the pleasure of reading Protect Your Windows Network From Perimeter To Data by Jesper Johansson and Steve Riley. Even though it lacks Vista coverage being written in 2005, it is still very relevant and useful to security professionals today. It's a book that I wish I had read sooner, as its a very good primer to security in a windows environment. Its the perfect companion to the Windows Security Resource Kit . The book's two authors are both seasoned security veterans and their IT geek humor is enjoyed throughout the book. I found myself thinking, "Yeah, I've been there before" several times and laughing at the absurdity of the situations we are frequently presented with. Two notes of caution about this book before delving in. These guys were both Microsoft employees at the time of the writing, so yes you will see some mild MS bias throughout, but they do a good job of reminding you in the text as well. I mean really, who recommends ISA server over a FW...