Black Hat Trainings (Vegas) questions

LonerVamp

I might have a chance to attend Black Hat USA in Las Vegas this year for the first time, and just had a few questions that I'm also researching on my own.

1. Do most people who attend gravitate to the 4-day trainings as opposed to the 2-day ones?

2. Any quick recommendations or suggestions? I know that's a huge topic, especially when you know nothing about me. I do both offense and defense in my day jobs, and I could probably pick up most any course that doesn't dive hard into C programming or assembly or Windows API types of stuff. (For reference, I took SEC542 a few weeks ago and FOR408 from SANS last year.)  It is outside my normal wheelhouse, but doing social engineering or gettings some hands-on with physical entry could be fun. Physical entry seems to be one that I have a hard time learning just on my own.

I'll also be looking at the instructors and if these courses/material are also offered elsewhere for far cheaper than the BHUSA price tag.

chrisone

Last two years I have taken Dark Side Ops: Custom Penetration Testing and SpecterOps Red Team Adversary Tactics. Both courses were 4 days, but this year I am taking Pentester Academy's Active Directory Attacks and Defense for Red and Blue Teams, which is a two day course.

4 day courses are only slightly more expensive, they obviously cover more material, and you spend more time building relationships with your class mates and instructors. It really comes down to the class and the material you want to cover. In reality, whatever course you take, you will probably spend months going over and analyzing the course work again (or at least you should be). 

Another tip or idea is to stay the entire week, attend Defcon and Bsides vegas. Purchase your defcon ticket when you buy your blackhat training, it is only $300 this year, Bsides is free. Defcon and Bsides provide free training courses as well, you just have to sign up when they release the sign ups (check twitter).

As for which BlackHat courses to take? well there are many good ones. I will list a few I like.