Wednesday, February 26, 2014

RSA Conference 2014: Wednesday

In getting yesterday's post up, there are a couple of things I forgot to include: a couple of general thoughts on the conference.  First, there is usually twenty minutes (or more)  between sessions.  So far, I've found this to be ample time to get from one track to another...and that includes going between West and one of the other buildings, like North.  That even holds true for today, when it rained.  I noticed today that in all talks you can hear the jingling of the badge holders - it reminds me of the clacking of poker chips in a poker room - and ultimately, it's white noise.  Pro Tip:  If you are sitting in the front of a session, be careful with what you are surfing on your laptop.  Screens project more than you think.  Finally, one thing that irks me are the session attendees that have to take a picture of EVERY slide, with their IPAD.  Really?  In one talk yesterday, I noticed a presenter spotted someone doing that, and I got the feeling he varied his pace just to throw the person taking pictures off.

Today was another busy day.  Here are the talks I went to:
  • Hacking Exposed: Day of Destruction by the CrowdStrike guys, George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch.  This was an awesome talk, where they literally destroyed some computers.  Yes, I think a couple were VMs, but they bricked at least one laptop.  And they showed how malware could literally fry a machine.  My question I didn't get to ask was:  could you do that on an airplane, or a hospital?  Consequences would be dire.
  • Gumshoes - Security Investigative Journalists Speak Out - Dan Hubbard from OpenDNS moderated a panel of Brian Krebs, Nicole Perlroth, and Kevin Poulsen. Again, this was another really great talk that I selected because I follow Brian Krebs' and Kevin Poulsen's blog religiously.  I hadn't heard of Nicole's work before, but I just added it to my feed reader.  Lots of great stuff was discussed.
  • Using Data Breadcrumbs to ID Targeted Attacks - Dan Hubbard.  This was only a twenty minute talk, and I enjoyed it.  It gave me some ideas to take back to the mother ship.
In the afternoon I went to the keynote talks.  Already, I look forward to tomorrow's talks.

No comments:

Post a Comment