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Monday, June 26, 2017

A Brief Recap of the SANS DFIR Summit


Hello again readers and welcome back!! I had the pleasure of attending (and speaking at, more on that in a bit!) at the 10th SANS DFIR Summit this past week. It is one conference that I always try to attend, as it always has a fantastic lineup of DFIR professionals speaking about amazing research and experiences that they have had. This year was, of course, no exception, as the two day event was filled with incredible talks. The full lineup of slides from the talks can be found here. This was also the first year that the presenters had "walk-up music" before the talks.


This year, my good friend Jessica Hyde and I gave a presentation on the Amazon "Echo-system" in a talk we titled "Alexa, are you Skynet". We even brought a slight cosplay element to the talk as I dressed up in a Terminator shirt and Jessica went full Sarah Connor! One other quick note about our talk that I would like to add, is we chose the song "All The Things" by Dual Core as our walk-up music. Dual Core actually lives in Austin and fortunately his schedule allowed him to attend our talk. It was really cool having the actual artist who performed our walk-up music be in attendance at our talk!

Jessica and I speaking about the Amazon Echo-system at the 2017 SANS DFIR Summit

We admittedly had a LOT of slides and a LOT of material to cover, but if you have attended any of our presentations in the past, the reason our slide decks tend to be long is that we want to make sure that the slides themselves can still paint a pretty good picture of what we talked about. This way, even if you were not fortunate enough to see our presentation, the you can follow along and the slides and they can also serve as reference points during future examinations. We received a lot of really great comments about our talk and had some fantastic conversations afterwards as well, so hopefully if you attended you enjoyed it!


My other favorite part of the DFIR Summit is getting to see colleagues and friends that you interact with throughout the year, actually in person and not just as a message box in a chat window! Even though some of us live fairly close to each other in the greater Baltimore/DC area, we fly 1500 miles every summer to hang out for a few days. While in Austin several of us had some discussions about trying to start some local meetup type events on a more regular basis, so there definitely will be more on that to follow in the coming weeks!