TakeDownCon 2016 (Rocket City)

Immersed in Rocket City

Conferences (cons) and training events where people from the same industry gather have become a great resource to network, share research, and give back. I submitted my call for papers and got picked up to participate in TakeDownCON by the EC-Council Foundation in Huntsville, AL. The event spanned two days and featured vendors, a capture the flag competition, and loads of opportunities to connect. The first day was the red team track and the second was the blue team track. This was my first information security presentation at a conference, and I definitely had a blast. I have been to about half a dozen conferences, but participating as a speaker is a slightly different experience—the best of both worlds. I attended all of the talks and placed 2nd in the Booz Allen Hamilton capture the flag competition.

Defending Against a Million “Attacks”

My talk was on Defending against 1,000,000 Cyber Attacks. The core idea was that every time you look around some company or government organization is spouting out a huge number of “cyber-attacks” to their network every day. Defending networks is never easy, but there is often a bit of exaggeration in how these encounters with intruders are counted. Misconceptions in reporting—and in understanding what constitutes an attack—tend to inflate the numbers. There are “attacks” like port scanning and brute forcing happening all across the internet at all hours of the day. Spreading awareness about them informs the public on just how “intense” these attacks truly are. To demonstrate this, I bought an attractive domain, paired it with a honeypot, and let the fun begin.

Slides and Resources

Here are the slides from my presentation: Download