Monday, September 28, 2009

Hacker Halted Wrap-up

This morning I have returned from HH and must get back to work. As always, I had a great time at the conference, and want to congratulate EC-Council of their hard work putting it together. Some of the highlights were:

Awards: Steven DeFino is "CEI (Certified EC|Council Instructor) of the Year" for the third year in a row and Intense School is the "North American Authorized Training Partner of the Year" for the second year in a row.

Cruise: Terremark sponsored a large yacht and invitied 350 V.I.Ps aboard for a 2 hour cruise that finished at a club in Downtown Miami. It was a perfect evening and the crowd included CEHs from all over the world. It was a party, 'nuff said.

Talks: Too many too good ones to write about them all. Its always fun to take a few days to listen to others talk about security for a change, and I picked up on a lot of new ideas and learned of some things I will blog more about as I research them further. Virtualization and cloud computing, Cyberwarfare, and online fraud were topics that received coverage from a view different angles.

In short, try to plan on being there next year if at all possible. I think you will be glad you took the time and leave with much to think about and inspired energy to expand your studies into new directions.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Hacker Journals - Examples fast and noise free

One of the most frequently asked questions I get is "What is a good website I should be visiting for news, downloads, videos and all things related to security?"

The intent behind this question has changed a bit over time. It used to be that I wanted to provide a long answer involving podcasts, blogs, rss feeds, ways to search YouTube for videos and explain the hazards of downloading "hacker tools" without looking through the source code first.

These days, time constraints are increasingly discouraging security professionals from staying informed. There are two many resources and too much noise to get through. Here is the solution:

http://www.hackerjournals.com

This is a clean, easy to read, noise free aggregation site that combines all of the above into one resource. Its still a fairly new site, so give it some time to fill in more content. But I highly recommend it as a book start page or favorite already.