Metricon 5 was this week, it was a blast you should have been there.

One of the things the program committee worked on was more of a practitioner focus.  I think the whole event was a good mix between theory and application and the overall blend was really, really good. Talking to the speakers before the event was much awesome as I could give them feedback on their talk proposal and then see how that conversation led to an awe-inspiring presentation.

I brought a couple security manager folks I know along with me and their opinion was that the event was way awesome. If you’re one of my blog readers and didn’t hunt me down and say hi, then whatcha waitin’ for, drop me an email and we’ll chat.

You can go check out the slides and papers at the Security Metrics site.

My slides are below.  I’m not sure if I was maybe a bit too far “out there” (I do that from time to time) but what I’m really looking for is a scorecard so that we can consciously build regulation and compliance frameworks instead of the way we’ve been doing it. This would help tremendously with public policy, industry self-regulation, and anybody who is trying to build their own framework.

• Massively Scaled Security Solutions for Massively Scaled IT
• Why We Need PCI-DSS to Survive
• Building A Modern Security Policy For Social Media and Government
• DojoCon 2009 Presentation
• Professor Rybolov’s Guide to InfoSec and Public Policy Analysis

This was announced a couple of weeks ago (at least 9000 days ago in Internet time) so now it’s “old news” but have a look at Metricon 5.0 which will be in DC on the 10th of August.

It’s a small group (attendance is capped at 60), but if you’re managing security in Government, I want to encourage you to do 2 things:

• Submit a paper!
• Attend and learn.

I’ll be there doing a bit of hero-worship of my own with the Security Metrics folks.

• Metricon 5 Wrapup
• NIST Framework for FISMA Dates Announced
• Certification and Accreditation Seminar, March 30th and 31st
• “Machines Don’t Cause Risk, People Do!”
• C&A Seminar in August, Instructor-to-Coolness Ratio Goes Up!

A little presentation I did for NoVA Hackers.  Basic intent was to be more workshop than something more formal and to give everybody the tools to do their own experimentation at home.

I even inspired Jack to write a blog post.

Caveat: this has nothing to do with FISMA or Government InfoSec.  =)

Links in the Presentation:

• Zint
• ZXing
• BeeTagg
• Other Readers

Links of interest:

• Code 128
• QR Code
• Data Formatting Fun

• Save a Kitten, Write SCAP Content
• DojoCon 2009 Presentation
• QR Code Temporary Tattoos Howto
• Barcode Hacking Process
• The Accreditation Decision and the Authorizing Official

A small presentation Dan Philpott and I put together for Potomac Forum about getting sane social media policy out of your security staff. I also recommend reading something I put out a couple of months ago about Social Media Threats and Web 2.0.

• DojoCon 2009 Presentation
• The Accreditation Decision and the Authorizing Official
• Certification and Accreditation Seminar, March 30th and 31st
• Massively Scaled Security Solutions for Massively Scaled IT
• Metricon 5 Wrapup

For those of you who didn’t know the real purpose of DojoCon, it was to raise money and awareness for Hackers for Charity. If you like anything that is in this post, go to HFC and make a donation of time, equipment, tech support, and maybe money. If you’ve never heard of HFC because you’re not one of the “InfoSec Cool Kids”, now is your chance–go read about them.

The video of my dojocon presentation. The microphone was off for the first couple of minutes but I look pretty animated.

And then the compliance panel that I tried not to dominate:

And finally, my slides are up on slideshare:

• Massively Scaled Security Solutions for Massively Scaled IT
• Building A Modern Security Policy For Social Media and Government
• Barcode Hacking
• Metricon 5 Wrapup
• Save a Kitten, Write SCAP Content

My presentation slides from Sector 2009.  This was a really fun conference, the Ontario people are really, really nice.

Presentation Abstract:

The US Federal Government is the world’s largest consumer of IT products and, by extension, one of the largest consumers of IT security products and services. This talk covers some of the problems with security on such a massive scale; how and why some technical, operational, and managerial solutions are working or not working; and how these lessons can be applied to smaller-scale security environments.

• A Layered Model for Massively-Scaled Security Management
• DojoCon 2009 Presentation
• Metricon 5 Wrapup
• Where is Rybolov?
• Building A Modern Security Policy For Social Media and Government