Impressions from BSides Augusta

Simply awesome!

What a great BSides event. Not only was it a short drive for me, but the event itself was top notch, all at the fantastic price of free. I can't gush enough about how great of an event this was. Excellent talks, great location and wonderful people. I volunteered for the event and you can read my experience from that as well as a rant about how awesome volunteering is by clicking <------- this link.

I love that this BSides decided to go with a blue team and a red team track. It helped define some of the talks that might not have been apparent in the title or in the abstract. Full disclosure: I'm a blue team guy and thus spent most of the day in the blue track. I hear there were some fantastic red team talks like Tim Tomes', The Adobe Guide to Keyless Decryption:

But there were also some fantastic blue team talks like Tim Crothers', Techniques for Fast Windows Investigations:

Or Chris Campbell's, Using Microsoft's Incident Response Language:

What I loved in particular about this talk was the Chris spent the majority of his talk going over actual code and techniques, which is not something I see a lot of talks doing. If you're interested in PowerShell, have it up while you're watching this talk.

There's also Chris Sanders' talk Defeating Cognitive Bias and Developing Analytic Technique which kicked off the blue team track:

Finally, Mark Baggett closed out BSides Augusta with his awesome talk Crazy Sexy Hacking:

These talks were the ones that impacted me the most. Everyone is going to get something different out of each talk. I would recommend you check out all the talks at the BSides Augusta YouTube channel. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

One other awesome thing happened at BSides Augusta in that the local media showed up announced and took footage of the event as well as conducted interviews with some of the organizers of the event. This is not just a good thing for BSides Augusta, but the infosec community as a whole.

We must present ourselves to the world as professionals and BSides Augusta did that very well. I look forward to more BSides, especially at Augusta.

 This post first appeared on Exploring Information Security.