The Day the Lights Went Out...

What happens when the power goes out at an IT conference? We kick it old school!

OK, so it was just a 20 minute outage. But when your presentations are an hour to an hour and a half long, 20 minutes is a huge chunk of time. And I was in Laura Chappell’s Network Forensics demonstration using the upcoming version of Wireshark (cool new stuff!). Laura just stepped out from behind the computer (since the projectors were dead, there was nothing she could show a room full of people) and started listing some possible signatures we could look for in our trace files. The power came back on – albeit, one leg at a time – and we moved forward with the demonstrations.

Every time Laura gives a presentation at a conference, I jump at the chance to take it. Laura teaches Wireshark – well, she does a lot more than that, but she is the premier Wireshark instructor. There is no way to absorb everything Laura knows about packet analysis in a day, much less a single session. Luckily, she has books out, information on her website, online courses (both free and in-depth paid courses), and week-long sessions for companies that want to hire her.

Laura Chappell has been my IT idol since my first IVNUA

Wireshark is a free, open-source network analysis tool that can be used both for network troubleshooting and network security analysis, including forensic analysis. More than 3000 developers have worked on Wireshark, and it will always be open-source. Wireshark averages 1 Million downloads per month.  For more information about Wireshark or to download it, check out this site. If you want to learn how to use Wireshark, check out Wireshark University. Laura has her own educational site at Chappell University

Here’s a bit of information from Laura that I wasn’t expecting – she believes that sometime in the future, Suricata will surpass and replace Snort in the IDS world. The next round of sessions include speaker Loyal Moses from Tactical FLEX, creator of Aanval. It will be interesting to hear his thoughts on Suricata.

Casino Night!

Other news from the conference: I chatted with some of the vendors, so expect to read more details about that in coming posts. Last night was casino night – a first for the IVNUA conference. I would say it went over well – there were a lot of happy people who stayed to the end of the evening.  And I had opportunity to visit with more of my IT idols – Jeremy Moskowitz and Kevin Remde.

Jeremy Moskowitz and Kevin Remde

More sessions today – I’ll have a report on what Loyal Moses has to say, on Kevin Remde's private cloud session ...and I’m signed up for a session about publishing ibooks.