So what motivates me to attend BlackHat? The #1 reason for me is networking — meeting new people and catching up with old friends and colleagues. Despite our best intentions, we are all busy and our networks are constantly expanding, making it increasingly difficult to stay in touch with old friends in the industry. Twitter and other forms of microblogging help you chip away at the communication gaps; you get a glimpse into peoples’ lives but it’s no replacement for a real conversation.

Obviously, the briefings themselves are a major draw. Even though it’s expanded to over 10 tracks now, the quality hasn’t really suffered. This year’s experiment with allowing paid delegates to vote on speakers seems to have produced a good lineup, though I’m sure there was still a selection committee that could and probably did overrule the votes in some cases. Either way, BlackHat presentations are a decent indicator of the overarching themes that will be prevalent in information security for the upcoming year or two.

When I first started attending BlackHat, I was drawn to the talks discussing 0-day vulnerabilities, tool releases, shellcode tricks, and the like. These days, anything relating to static analysis, automation, and of course web security are most interesting to me. I also consider who’s speaking, regardless of the topic (e.g. one of these guys presents, I’m there). In general, I’ll try to gauge how much value the speaker will add to the presentation — in other words, what do I gain by attending the talk vs. flipping through the slides later? I never attend every time slot; sometimes the hallway conversation is just more interesting.

Some of my other reasons for attending, in no particular order, most of which fall under the “networking” umbrella:

• The parties (duh)
• The Pwnie Awards
• Meeting fellow security bloggers
• Recruiting speakers for SOURCE
• Finding future Veracode employees
• Trading war stories
• Picking up vendor schwag for my kids (RSA is much better for this one)
• Meeting current and former customers — and future ones, hopefully

Things I could do without:

• The cigarette smoke
• The heat
• Quark’s

I’ve stuck around for DEFCON a couple times in the past, but I don’t anymore. I fly out Friday morning or early afternoon so I get home in time to spend the weekend with the family. Personally, three days in Vegas is plenty for me.

When it gets closer to BlackHat time, I’ll post my picks from the briefings schedule.

After hearing his speech, I thought about how Eric and Google are impacting the digital revolution after so many others have tried unsuccessfully over the last 25 years. He has led the company through a period of explosive growth from $1 Billion to over $16 Billion in the past year, while keeping the young, fun, irreverent culture intact. Considering the meteoric rise of Google’s popularity in a reasonably short period of time, to the point that the company name is now actually a verb!

The point that I found enlightening was his summary, which you can scroll to at the 26 - 30 minutes timeframe in the presentation, where he shared an interesting glimpse into the culture of Google. “Creating more luck, giving yourself more at bats, being out there… to think big and inspire a culture of YES.” The culture of Yes inspires people to aim higher and be ambitious in their reach and goals.

That is a very interesting point in which I really believe. If there is one thing that all companies and especially small companies struggle with because of natural resource constraints, it is building a strong culture of Yes. We have tried to do this from the very inception of ScienceLogic, but it continues to get harder and harder the larger the business grows. To consistently inspire a principle of Yes, without agreeing to every idea that flows across my desk is amongst the most challenging parts of our daily jobs. However if I could create the perfect scenario, we would intuitively strive for a principle of Yes and inspire our associates and our ecosystem of partners and customers to use this simple concept to confidently go forward.

Eric says, “It is possible to build a culture around innovation. It is possible to build a culture around leadership, and it is possible to build a culture around optimism.” Google is a great example, but by no means the only example. I agree with Eric’s summary and hope to lead ScienceLogic according to these very basic but essential principles. “Let’s be revolutionaries. Let’s take this opportunity, this huge change that is before us with technology and let’s change our businesses, our communication and the way we interact on some new principles that reflect the very best in America.”

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From Paterva dot com:

The Community Edition is limited in the following ways:

* A 15second nag screen
* Save and Export has been disabled
* Limited zoom levels
* Can only run transforms on a single entity at a time
* Cannot copy and paste text from detailed view
* Transforms limited to 75 per day
* Throttled client to TAS communication

http://www.paterva.com/maltego/community-edition/

Tests by heise Security show that four of the six services tested were vulnerable to attack.

While all of the tested systems encrypt communication with the backup server using SSL, external attackers can sniff the access code as plain text by acting as a man-in-the-middle (MITM) if the locally installed backup software does not perform sufficiently rigorous checks on the authenticity of the server’s certificates. In the vulnerable systems, we were able to hijack the connection from the client software to the backup servers.

Four of six may not be a large test sample, but it does raise concerns about trust between customers and their service providers. If you’re providing or purchasing this kind of service, you might want to look into it closely to make sure your data is secure.