Security for a day

Been a busy few months in the real world with work, life and everything else.

Since passing the GSE written exam, I’ve been building up a lab, practical practice examples and a stock of reading reference materials. I’ll blab on about the books and what they are at some later point. An interesting aside, some of the operating systems used in the GSE exam have been updated. Backtrack 1 now becomes Backtrack 4 and Fedora 4 becomes Fedora 12 so a great time to master more current OS’s.

The two day practical part of the GSE exam takes place in Las Vegas on the 18th and 19th of September. This means I’ll finish two days of examination hell just in time for the SANS Network Security 2010 conference

As I’m in Las Vegas and SANS is running on of its biggest conferences of the year, I’d be remiss to not try to squeeze in a bit more training.

I’ve applied to be a volunteer as part of SANS work study program and crossing my fingers to be accepted. With forty courses on offer, my number one choice is Steve Sim’s Developing Exploits for Penetration Testers and Security Researchers.

This course is really out of my comfort zone and a huge challenge in itself, nevermind the GSE study that I’m doing. I’ve only really played with the skills the course has taught while studying for OffSec’s PWB exam, but the topic is compelling and will help lift the shroud of script kiddie tools that I use. With both Steve Sims and Jim Shewmaker teaching the course it, should be absolutely brilliant to be able to learn from both these guys and mature my understanding this complex piece of IT security.

I’ve noticed that some very smart cookies are taking this course, including Wesley McGrew. Great, real security researchers, coding gurus and me. Well,  at least I know I asking the person sitting next to me what this all means  should get a sensible answer