Thanks for a Great Incident Detection Summit

We had a great SANS WhatWorks in Incident Detection Summit 2009 this week! About 100 people attended. I'd like to thank those who joined the event as attendees; those who participated as keynotes (great work Ron Gula and Tony Sager), guest moderators (Rocky DeStefano, Mike Cloppert, and Stephen Windsor), speakers, and panelists; Debbie Grewe and Carol Calhoun from SANS for their excellent logistics and planning, along with our facilitators, sound crew, and staff; our sponsors, Allen Corp., McAfee, NetWitness, and Splunk; and also Alan Paller for creating the two-day "WhatWorks" format.

I appreciate the feedback from everyone who spoke to me. It sounds like the mix of speakers and panels was a hit. I borrowed this format from Rob Lee and his Incident Repsonse and Computer Forensics summits, so I am glad people liked it. I think the sweet spot for the number of panelists might be 4 or 5, depending on the topic. If it's more theoretical, with a greater chance of audience questions, a smaller number is better. If it's more of a "share what you know," like the tools and techniques panel, then a bigger number is ok.

Probably the best news from the Summit was the fact that SANS already scheduled the second edition -- the SANS WhatWorks in Incident Detection Summit 2010, 8-9 December 2010 in DC. I still need to talk to SANS about how it will work. They've asked me to combine log management with incident detection. I think that is interesting, since I included content on logs in this year's incident detection event. I'd like to preserve the single-track nature of the Summit, but it might be useful to have a few break-outs for people who want to concentrate on a single technology or technique.

I appreciate the blog coverage from Tyler Hudak and Matt Olney so far. Please let me know what you thought of the last event, and if you have any requests for the next one.

Before December 2010, however, I'm looking forward to the SANS What Works in Forensics and Incident Response Summit 2010, 8-9 July 2010, also in DC.

The very next training event for me is my TCP/IP Weapons School 2.0 at Black Hat in DC, 31 Jan - 1 Feb. Regular registration ends 15 January, so sign up while there are still seats left! This class tends to sell out due to the number of defense industry participants in the National Capitol Region.

Comments

Alex said…
Richard,

Attended the Summit all the way from Malaysia while spending more hours on the plane than I'll get CPE credits for, lol. I think it was a good experience for me, know that there are similarities in the Incident Detection challenges we face throughout the world. But also glad to know of so many other tools, techniques and challenges that I would not have been aware off if I haven't taking the trip to the Summit.
So thanks to you and SANS for making the trip worth while!
2:50 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technical or pol
Read more