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, which helped me understand assembly code structures much better. I would highly recommend this course.

    The first keynote speech by Ian Angell was very funny, but essentially preached an anti technology message which I think is mostly pointless considered the techno-geek audience. He did have some really fascinating quotes though. My first presentation was Bad Sushi: Beating Phishers at Their Own Game. While presenting nothing new, they did provide much comedy and insight into how spammers routinely try to rip each other off.  They also showed an insane toolkit that traffics in the spam underground that basically contains knock off sites for every large bank in the world. Of course the next session was the highly anticipated DNS Goodness by Dan Kaminsky. This has already been covered to death, so I will only add that it was worth the wait and Dan is the man. Next I attended The Four Horsemen of the Virtualization Security Apocalypse by Chris Hoff. This was probably the most useful and timely presentation I attended. Chris is a good speaker and I enjoyed how he detailed the current shortcomings of virtualization, while also pointing out VM myths as well. In a nutshell, the HA functionality is not there to do anything more then server/desktop virtualization. Beyond that, you are rolling the dice with your availability and network capacity. 

    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 . 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 response were dead on. They included great case data on the book DVD, which helps you work through the sample cases as well. That is a huge feature that needs to become standard in security books, where feasible. Probably the standout feature of the book for me though, was their chapters on analyzing unknown binaries. By following along step by step through the cases, its helps turn something that is considered more of an art, into a science. They also include good coverage of doing a forensic analysis of a palm device, and included the requisite chapters on email investigation, registry analysis, and browser forensics. One thing that I took note of during the book, was the chapter on building a response toolkit. They pointed out that you need to use filemon to ensure none of your trusted tools access the victims system for resources and instead are using libraries from your toolset. The authors also did a good job of showing both open source and commerical tools throughout the book.