Things have been really busy lately. First off, my Mentor session for SANS Security 504 started on September 21st.  We are at the halfway point right now and leading this has been incredible.  It seems whenever I need to present or teach something I learn more than anyone else.  Plus teaching is just fun!  Particularly when it is about stuff that I really enjoy.  The student reviews have been great so far, so I must be doing something right.

Next, the Utah Open Source Conference (UTOSC) was two weeks ago, from October 7th to the 9th.  There were a lot of great presentations and I had an absolute blast hanging out with all the technology loving folks who came.  I was somewhat surprised on how far some people came to get there.  I met people from Idaho, Wyoming, and California.  It was really fun to sit in presentations and workshops on things that aren’t necessarily security related.  It gave me some time to listen to what’s going on in other areas of technology and that’s can be really refreshing.

If that wasn’t enough, I also was able to speak at UTOSC again this year.  Last year I spoke on building a toolkit of open source security tools.  This year I did a presentation on Metasploit.  I picked Metasploit because I started learning how to write modules for the framework this year.  So doing a presentation on it seemed like a great way to learn even more about it.  If nothing else, it would get me to spend more time using it and that’s where things really take off.  My recording of the presentation didn’t go so well, so I’m waiting for the folks at UTOSC to release their recording.  My slides are online though and you can download them on this site or view them at SlideShare.net/Tadaka.  I put the presentation slides up on SlideShare after some folks expressed their reservations about downloading a PDF file from me after I mentioned backdooring PDF files.  Go figure!

One offshoot of the UTOSC presentation was that one of the audience members, Joshua Williams, participates in the Linux Basix Podcast.  It turns out that Joshua does this podcast with Infolookup, who is someone I know from IRC.  They were chatting about my presentation and Infolookup realized that I was the guy he knew in IRC.  One thing lead to another and I was invited to participate on last week’s Linux Basix Podcast!  We spent about an hour chatting it up about Metasploit and just covering some of the basics about it.  I really want to thank they guys for inviting me on.  I had a ton of fun and they were all extremely friendly.  You can download the podcast at http://www.linuxbasix.com/026-LB.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last month and a half or so.  Now to something still to come.  Paraben’s forensics conference (PFIC) will be on November 7th to 10th.  I went last year and had a great time.  Being very new to the forensics world, it was quite an interesting event.  It is in Park City, UT at The Canyons Resort.  I’m really looking forward to this year.  If you are in the Utah area and want to attend a great, inexpensive conference then check it out.  The cost is $299 and has some excellent speakers scheduled up. If you are there, let me know and we can meet somewhere.  Meeting new people is one of the really cool things about conferences like this.

That’s all the events at this point.  I’m hoping to get something else scheduled up in the next few months, but we will have to see how that goes.  I’m also planning on doing another SANS Mentor session next year.  I take what I learned this year and apply it to the next class.