dualism

Obviously I’ve neglected to mention much about what happened outside of Shmoocon this past weekend, mainly because I wanted the Shmoocon posts to be about Shmoocon, and not much else.
So here we go:
DC Sleeps Alone Tonight
I had never really partied in DC before, and it makes VA Beach look like an elementary school playground. [...]

Today was just wrapping things up. We checked out of our hotel rooms and stopped by the con, I ducked in on a couple of the presentations going on, and picked up DVDs of the presentations I found to be the most interesting, or most useful for why we were sent there by our [...]

Day Two was more about DC than it was Shmoocon. We managed to hit up some of the presentations while also making sure to visit with the various vendors and talk with some real security gurus at the same time.
Unlike the first day, this was more about one presentation for me than any of [...]

I write this now, having slept from approximately 4am to 8:30am, but we’ll get to that in a minute or two
Registration was supposed to start at 1pm according to the guide, but it was more like 1:40ish. In any event Andy and I were all set by 2pm and collected some vendor swag, had [...]

My new addiction when i’m at my desktop at home is StumbleUpon.  I’ve been using it for approximately a month now, and i’ve discovered so many interesting and useful websites through it, I don’t know how I used to surf the internet the way I did to be honest.
The other day I was greeted to [...]

I might as well make the vow from here on out that barring any disasters, there will be at least one post per week here.
With that said, here are some of the things i’ve been up to in the last 6 days:
Movies: Finally got around to watching Pirates of Silicon Valley. I thought [...]

Rootkits
Checking up on packetstormsecurity.com today I see confirmation of what has been getting a lot of news lately — rootkits. According to pandasoftware (the vendor of the Panda antivirus/antispyware/etc products) there was a substantial increase in rootkits last year.
I believe we’re going to see that activity peak in the next year or two as [...]

Yesterday I began the SANS Security 504 course being offered here in Norfolk, at the gracious expense of my employer, Uncle Sam.  2 days in, I can say that this is definitely helping me point myself in the right direction for when I exit the Navy in about 18 months and also opening my eyes [...]

In the computer world, credentials have always been a little bit different from most other industries. Lawyers, Engineers, Teachers, Doctors, and similar professions have some sort of structured peer-reviewed and enforced system for distributing and maintaining credentials for the work that they do. It is a way of protecting people from illegitimate practice [...]

I’d like to point out some of the places I go at least once or twice a week in order to stay current in the network security field.
Official/Semi-Official channels:
The SANS Internet Storm Center (ISC):  http://isc.sans.org
Secunia:  http://secunia.com
SecurityFocus:  http://www.securityfocus.com
US-CERT Current Activity page:  http://www.us-cert.gov/current/current_activity.html
Unofficial:
Slashdot:  http://slashdot.org
Google News (Sci/Tech and Business):  http://news.google.com
InfoSecNews Mailing List:  http://www.infosecnews.org