What a week: TechEd, 70-417, GCWN
cyberguypr
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in Off-Topic
Last week was crazy. As the title says it involved all of those. Details below.
TechEd
The event was awesome. It was my first TechEd ever so I was building excitement weeks in advance.
Arrived Saturday afternoon and went out to explore New Orleans. Nice city. Plenty of food and booze options. Several touristy things are available although I couldn't do any of them. as most close by 5PM. Now I have an excuse to go back to NOLA.
I started Sunday AM with the pre-conference titled Lessons from the Field: Useful Hacker Techniques for Administrators. This was conducted by Paula Januszkiewicz, Hasain Alshakarti, and Marcus Murray, all security experts focusing on Windows technologies. It was an eye opener session showing exploitation techniques with tools such as gsecdump, mimikatz, CyberGate, FOCA, Core Impact Pro and others. They also provided tips on mitigation techniques for most of the things they showed. Very good session. Makes you realize you can't win the battle and just need to be ready to mitigate whatever threat affects your systems.
The regular conference went along Monday thru Thursday. I hit sessions including APTs, Exchange 2013, PowerShell, AD enhancements and others. Good content and great speakers. One of my favorite sessions was Hunting Malware with Mark Russinovich. He showed real examples on how the Sysinternals tools can help resolve malware issues that would be otherwise undetectable.
Got a chance to briefly chat with Rick Claus, Mark Russinovich (he even signed my Windows Internals book), and other very knowledgeable folks whose names I can't remember. Information overload is typical here.
They also had a ton of computers so you could do labs and experience MS products. I did half a dozen including Exchange and Lync high availability, DirectAccess, PowerShell, IPAM, and a few others. My experience was smooth, although some reported slowness I never experienced this. They also had 3 big rooms with instructor-led labs.
After being in line for 2 hours I had a chance to pick up two Surface devices at a heavily discounted price (RT for $99, PRO for $399). I opened up the PRO to play with it but I don't care for it at all. They will most likely end up on eBay or CL.
Great venue, great food, good content, but closing party was kind of lame. Overall a great experience.I'm hoping to make TechEd a yearly thing.
70-417
A few weeks ago I signed up for 70-417 to be taken onsite at TechEd. They had a 50% off offer so I couldn't resist. They even had several prep sessions (3 different ones covering 70-410 , 11, and 12) but I could only fit one in my schedule. The session was OK at best. The guy just red material from a PPT and try to give some tips. I ended up leaving early because I couldn't take his style. Too boring for me.
So I took the test Wednesday morning and passed. I got a t-shirt with "CERTIFIABLE" on the front and the MS logo on the back. A lot of people were asking me where I got it. I felt exclusive
I scored in the mid 700's. Lowest score I've ever gotten. My weakest are was AD federation which was well covered in the test.This shows how doing multiple things at once affects you. I had TechEd, the Stanly VMware class, and GCWN in my mind. Multitasking sucks.
GCWN
As some of you may know I did the SANS work/study program last October and as a result got a voucher for a free GCWN attempt. Since it was about to expire my only option was to take it as soon as I came back from TechEd. Ended up taking it on 6/8 but did not pass. For some reason I don't understand yet I totally procrastinated with this and ended up doing ZERO studying. After 8 months since the course took place the details were just not there. I thought about cancelling the test but that would've meant wasting the voucher. At least now I've seen the test and know what a SANS exam looks like. This is my first failed exam ever but given I did not study I'm OK. Can't win them all.
So now I'm back to normal. Focusing on the Stanly class for now and hopefully taking VCP when summer dies down. I also changed roles at work and am getting adjusted to my new team. Will be posting about it soon. Fun times!
TechEd
The event was awesome. It was my first TechEd ever so I was building excitement weeks in advance.
Arrived Saturday afternoon and went out to explore New Orleans. Nice city. Plenty of food and booze options. Several touristy things are available although I couldn't do any of them. as most close by 5PM. Now I have an excuse to go back to NOLA.
I started Sunday AM with the pre-conference titled Lessons from the Field: Useful Hacker Techniques for Administrators. This was conducted by Paula Januszkiewicz, Hasain Alshakarti, and Marcus Murray, all security experts focusing on Windows technologies. It was an eye opener session showing exploitation techniques with tools such as gsecdump, mimikatz, CyberGate, FOCA, Core Impact Pro and others. They also provided tips on mitigation techniques for most of the things they showed. Very good session. Makes you realize you can't win the battle and just need to be ready to mitigate whatever threat affects your systems.
The regular conference went along Monday thru Thursday. I hit sessions including APTs, Exchange 2013, PowerShell, AD enhancements and others. Good content and great speakers. One of my favorite sessions was Hunting Malware with Mark Russinovich. He showed real examples on how the Sysinternals tools can help resolve malware issues that would be otherwise undetectable.
Got a chance to briefly chat with Rick Claus, Mark Russinovich (he even signed my Windows Internals book), and other very knowledgeable folks whose names I can't remember. Information overload is typical here.
They also had a ton of computers so you could do labs and experience MS products. I did half a dozen including Exchange and Lync high availability, DirectAccess, PowerShell, IPAM, and a few others. My experience was smooth, although some reported slowness I never experienced this. They also had 3 big rooms with instructor-led labs.
After being in line for 2 hours I had a chance to pick up two Surface devices at a heavily discounted price (RT for $99, PRO for $399). I opened up the PRO to play with it but I don't care for it at all. They will most likely end up on eBay or CL.
Great venue, great food, good content, but closing party was kind of lame. Overall a great experience.I'm hoping to make TechEd a yearly thing.
70-417
A few weeks ago I signed up for 70-417 to be taken onsite at TechEd. They had a 50% off offer so I couldn't resist. They even had several prep sessions (3 different ones covering 70-410 , 11, and 12) but I could only fit one in my schedule. The session was OK at best. The guy just red material from a PPT and try to give some tips. I ended up leaving early because I couldn't take his style. Too boring for me.
So I took the test Wednesday morning and passed. I got a t-shirt with "CERTIFIABLE" on the front and the MS logo on the back. A lot of people were asking me where I got it. I felt exclusive
I scored in the mid 700's. Lowest score I've ever gotten. My weakest are was AD federation which was well covered in the test.This shows how doing multiple things at once affects you. I had TechEd, the Stanly VMware class, and GCWN in my mind. Multitasking sucks.
GCWN
As some of you may know I did the SANS work/study program last October and as a result got a voucher for a free GCWN attempt. Since it was about to expire my only option was to take it as soon as I came back from TechEd. Ended up taking it on 6/8 but did not pass. For some reason I don't understand yet I totally procrastinated with this and ended up doing ZERO studying. After 8 months since the course took place the details were just not there. I thought about cancelling the test but that would've meant wasting the voucher. At least now I've seen the test and know what a SANS exam looks like. This is my first failed exam ever but given I did not study I'm OK. Can't win them all.
So now I'm back to normal. Focusing on the Stanly class for now and hopefully taking VCP when summer dies down. I also changed roles at work and am getting adjusted to my new team. Will be posting about it soon. Fun times!