Presentation at ECPI University

On Thursday, June 4, 2015, ColaSec was invited to ECPI University here in Columbia to give a presentation on Linux/Unix security. Jeff and Adam spent several hours building a security presentation for a students looking to get into infosec. Here are some thoughts from one of the presenters:

Jeff

"The presentation for ECPI was an interesting experience.  We were
asked to come up with something dealing with Unix/Linux and Security.
We were given a time frame for anything from 1 hour to 3 hours.  Adam
and I put together an presentation dealing with things like what
security professionals do, why they do it, what tools they use, how
you deal with data breaches, and some general sysadmin style best
practices for securing linux systems and user accounts.

It turned out to be a lot of material but we covered most of it,
albeit in 3.5 hours (with an unexpected 30 minute lunch break).  We
had some demos tossed in and for the most part the demo gods were good
to us and we were able to complete all but one demo (ran out of time)
on network flow data.  It proved that both Adam and I are talkers and
need to learn to stick to the material.

Most of the class seemed to appreciate the talk.  They seemed to
appreciate the fact we told real life stories and experiences.  They
also liked that we expanded on information on the slides rather than
just read them the information that was there.  We got a lot of good
questions from the class and hope they took some useful information
away from it.

They perked up when we started talking about Wireshark because they
had some exercises on that during class.  They wanted more information
about it and how its used.  We're going to follow up with them with
some links for packet capture challenges (they will be uploaded to the
presentation's google document that they have access to).  These are
games that have been setup that require you to use tcpdump or
wireshark to uncover information hidden in network packets.

Adam and I agreed that we have some tweaking to do to the presentation
and maybe look at breaking it into three parts that can be done
separately or chained together for a longer one.  All and all I think
it went well and I learned some good things from the experience and I
hope the students did also."

Pictures of the presentation are available in the gallery section and the slides can be found via this Google Slides link.