GreyHat Cyber Defense Workshop

I attended a recent network mapping workshop hosted by the University of Washington Grey Hat Group at the Tacoma campus. Although the nmap exercise was review for me, I found out about a couple new tools and an upcoming event that are worth sharing.

BackTrack is a sweet Linux distro that bundles some great security tools. Although Nessus is notably missing, apparently because of their new proprietary license for version 3, the distro appears much more up-to-date than Knoppix STD and Nubuntu.

DVL (Damn Vulnerable Linux), a play on Damn Small Linux, is neat little distro that you can use as a test target of your scanning and pen testing skills.

Finally, there is a cyber-security competition coming up in April 2008, to be hosted at a large Redmond software company. This is not a vendor specific event; it was held last year at a military base near Tacoma. Here's the rub: this appears to be the same weekend as LinuxFest NW, so I'm undecided on how I'll spend my weekend. LinuxFest is a lot of fun, and makes for a good family outing. My son enjoys it too; we both like the presentations, salmon bake, and world-famous raffle.