Last Updated on Sunday, 29 January 2012 16:29 Written by Brian Baskin Sunday, 01 January 2012 13:35

It's been quite a few months since my last post, but this has definitely been a hectic and busy year. It's mostly due to that schedule that I've been unable to post anything interesting since... April. Wow.

When 2011 started I was just a few months into my new job with cmdLabs, a truly life-changing event. I still enjoy my time with Eoghan, Chris, and Terry and incredibly love what I do.  It was only about a year ago when I felt completely helpless, bored, and unchallenged with my old employer. The technical challenges weren't coming, and I spent most of my time performing management tasks where the largest difficulties were to organize large spreadsheets, though I did volunteer for the job so I don't have too much of a right to complain. I sought out every opportunity with the outside to keep my feet grounded in technical work.  With my continuing time at cmdLabs, that's changed dramatically. Each case was a fun and intricate challenge, and I was surrounded by the best to bounce ideas off of on a regular basis.

While working with cmdLabs the opportunity was open to provide forensic support to the Defense Computer Forensics Laboratory (DCFL). It took quite a few months for that to take place, but I finally joined the ranks there in early September. DCFL is a part of DC3 (Defense Cyber Crime Center), where I've been since 2000. However, I was always in the training side and not in the lab, and now the veil has been opened.

I took a spot in the Intrusions and Information Assurance division (I2A) as an intrusion analyst.  It is no surprise that this is some of the most completely challenging and complex work I've ever done. I think back to the joy of performing penetration testing on servers and the rush of "popping a box", and realized that it doesn't compare with rewriting a large mathematical algorithm full of bitwise math to decode a new encoding method used to mask the exfiltration of data. 

However, the first rule of defense work is that you don't talk about defense work. My social interactions have diminished greatly, mostly due to not having access to personal electronics or regular websites during working hours. As someone who loves to code new projects and release code and processes, I've had to place much of my personal commentary under self-scrutiny. And, when in doubt, bite my tongue and move on.

During the year I was roped into joining the General Dynamics - AIS (GD-AIS) team on the Maryland Cyber Challenge (MDC3 - no relation to DC3). This was a three-round contest that focused on blue-team, red-team, and forensics. For the blue-team exercise our team of six broke into two teams of three to focus on securing a Linux and Windows server, with myself on the Linux team. We passed that round and went into the Forensics round, which unfortunately occurred the same weekend I was at Derbycon - two hours after my talk, in fact. The staff at Derbycon kindly let me setup in the press room to work on the challenge remotely. Being remote on my Mac limited my abilities, but the challenge had a fair number of encoding and encryption challenges that I was able to break, and we passed the round. The final round was live at the Baltimore Conference Center, and was a bit of a shock. Up until 24 hours before the challenge we were told it was a full Capture the Flag with blue and red teaming. The day before we learned that it was full red-team, so we had to quickly adjust and retrain our team. We were easily outskilled by other competitors, but we placed decently.

For 2011 I stuck myself out there, much to the complaint of my introverted self. When the CFP for Defcon was about to wrap up, I decided to put together a talk called "Walking the Green Mile: How to Get Fired From Your Job After a Security Incident". A silly title, but I really suck at naming talks. The talk was about my increasing frustration in how many security practitioners were not doing their jobs right before, during, and after a security incident. As someone who has worked for years with many companies to respond to a security incident (including insiders, inrusions, and malware), I kept running into the same mistakes being made over and over. The talk was surmising those mistakes in a way for others to learn to stop making them.

I first submitted the talk to Defcon, then Security BSides Vegas. I was declined for Defcon, which I expected, and was ecstatic at being selected for BSides. I was already volunteering to work on the security team there, so was already "in", but being able to speak was the icing on the cake. I also gave the talk at Defcon Skytalks, an unrecorded, off the record room at Defcon.

"That wasn't so bad", I told myself. So, I submitted for Derbycon and was surprised to be accepted there as well. Derbycon was a first year conference that was perfectly orchestrated. It was also, in my opinion, the best rendition of my talk that I had given; maybe because I didn't realize that I was being recorded until afterward.  

 I then finished up my speaking circuit at the local BSides Delaware, which went pretty great.  But, it was after this event that I just grew tired of speaking. Too many talks in the year than what I was accustomed to. And, for me, every time I get on podium I'm anxiously awaiting someone to stand up, scream out, or do something to show how wrong I am and how I shouldn't be up talking. Then afterward, I crash from the stress and am usually mentally exhausted for hours.  So, likely no voluntary conference talks for me in 2012.

However, that won't be so easy to escape. I start off 2012 at the DoD Cyber Crime Conference. There I will be "teaching" two pre-conference training courses. I was originally billed to teach the Carrier File Analysis course (malware analysis of PDF, CHM, compound documents, SWF, etc). Staffing issues meant that I now am doing half-teaching of that course and the Introduction to Malware Analysis, which occurs simultaneously. So it looks like I'll be running back and forth between the two sold-out classes for four days.  While there I will also be giving my Intelligence Gathering Over Twitter talk for the second year. It will be an update from last year, on tools and methods to obtain information about a target on Twitter and their associations. Group analysis, friend analysis, metadata, and metasites (twitpic, etc).  After that, I'll be done for 2012 :)

I will still be trying to volunteer for BSides events for Vegas and Delaware, and planning on attending Shmocon, Defcon, BSides Vegas, Derbycon, and BSides Delaware. I'm going to make a push to finally attend RECon this year. But, being on-site full-time makes taking time off difficult, so I have to carefully pick and choose my cons.

Looking forward to new challenges in the upcoming year. Life is definitely more of a roller coaster ride now!