Double Tall Iced Mocha, Lite on the Chocolate

Recently I have been getting all the stuff for Shmoocon Labs off the ground. In case you don’t know Shmoocon Labs is an event held one day prior to Shmoocon. The basic idea is as follows. Get 30 or so geeks, a handful of vendors with cool gear and spend a day hammering out the production network for Shmoocon. This includes the network that supports registration, the hacker arcade, and of course conference attendees. In addition we attempt to eat our own dogfood and build a tight network that will hopefully hold up against all the potential tomfoolery that happens at hacker cons.

There are couple of things we try to achieve by doing this:

• Give people an opportunity to get hands on experience with the latest security and networking products
• Get the vendors to show us their chops when it comes to rapidly deploying their gear in a real world environment
• Create an open environment in the NOC where people can come by and check out the network, ask questions, etc…
• Do yet another thing to make Shmoocon a unique experience when it comes to security conferences
• Of course have fun doing it

Last year was the first year we did this and it was a success. It seems like every one had a great time, we actually did get the network up and running in time. We implemented and/or played with various technologies including but not limited too:

• IPS
• NAC
• Vulnerability Assesment/Auditing
• Centrally managed wifi using a controller and light weight AP based wireless system
• Network Monitoring including availiblity, utilization, etc…
• Centralized logging

And probably more that I can’t recall at the moment.

So anyways its time to do it again. If you have any suggestions or ideas for things that might make it more interesting this year, please let me know. This is includes things like:

• Vendors interested in participating
• Interesting open source tools to use
• Local network services to offer
• Ideas for contests and or games

Of course if you are going to Shmoocon and interested in participating go to the Labs web page.

Adam mentioned a mailing list discussion we participated in where I spouted off some suggestions for giving presentations. This is has a slight bent to hacker cons. Funny thing is I am sure I am guilty of quite a few things on that list when it comes to presentation throw down. But eh, I still think they are good.If you want to see the master of hacker con presos see j0hnny talk at least once.

Shmoocon tickets have been on sale now for a couple of days and early bird tickets for the first round have sold out! You can still get “Open Reg” and “I love shmoocon” tickets at the registration page.

Myself and Cowboym have been organizing the NOC for the past two Shmoocons, this year in addition to normal NOCiness I will running the Shmoocon Labs. Read the page for a longer description, but basically we are opening the NOC up to vendors and hackers alike to help build and break the network. If you are interested in this (vendor, hacker or otherwise), email “shmooconlabs” aT “shmoocon.org”.

Last ShmooCon we started the Hacker Arcade. This dude Ethan brought down a skill crane that was hooked up to a pc and available to control over the local wireless network and the Internet. Someone ended up winning most of the skill crane prizes by writting an automated script to hit every spot, it kicked ass, it was huge, it was awesome how much effort went in to whole thing. Anyways its back online now.