Only the Black Hat Briefings conference will provide your people with the tools and understanding they need to help thwart those lurking either in the shadows of your firewall or the depths of your companies WAN.  The reality is, they are out there.  The choice is yours.  You can live in fear of them.  Or, you can learn from them.

The Black Hat Briefings will focus on the vital security issues facing organizations with large Enterprise networks and mixed network operating systems.  The current hot topics include Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDos), Computer Forensics (CF) software, Incident Response, web based vulnerabilities, issues with security in a High Availability (HA) environment, secure programming techniques, tool selection and more.  You will be put face to face with the people developing the tools used by and against hackers.

New for 2000 there will be an extended "side session" track and a different speech selection criteria.  Read on..

Spanning two days with three separate tracks and a side session.  The conference is broken up into a number of tacks.  They can best be described as follows:

Technical - These talks might cover demonstrations, examples and overviews of new attacks, technologies, or trends.  These are technical issues all security practitioners should be aware of.

More Technical - These talks could include source code examples, specific focus on a technical detail, or any topic that may require previous knowledge.  The nuts and bolts.

White Hat - These talks will help management decide what to do about all the technical issues surrounding security.  These talks may cover legal ramifications of an intrusion, corporate trends in managing networks, and issues with out-sourcing network services and how to manage these young wipper-snappers.

This third track, nick named the "White Hat" track, was developed by the National Computer Security Center (NCSC) of the National Security Agency.  While the other tracks have a technology focus, this track is for people who have to manage it.  What should you look for when hiring an outside security consultant?  Should you even look outside your organization?

Deep Knowledge - The Deep Knowledge track will be an off shoot of tracks A and B.  While speakers in both of those tracks will be given 50 minutes for their talk, side session speakers will be given 100 minutes.  It works like this:  Say Marcus Ranum is giving a talk in the More Technical track.  He starts off in that track, uses up his time, and then moves to the Deep Knowledge track.  If what was said interested you in his More Technical Tack, you could follow him over to the Deep Knowledge track to spend two more hours getting a much more in depth exposure to his topic.  Due to the time consumed, only certain speeches will be designated as having a Deep Knowledge talk.

The Black Hat Briefing's intense sessions will bring to light the security and mis-configuration problems confronting organizations and network administrators, most of which go unnoticed by today's preoccupied system administrators where security gets put off in lieu of constant network growth and upgrades.  Our speakers will discuss the strategies involved in correcting existing problems and speak towards what you can expect in the future.

This year you can expect more visual demonstrations, more speakers who are authoritative in their fields, and as always an excellent time.  Be sure to arrive the evening before in order to make it to the informal get together and birds of a feather.  Black Hat is more than just good speeches, it is about making solid contacts in the security space.

As an added bonus, people who attend The Black Hat Briefings get free admission to DEF CON 8.0, the largest Hacker convention in the U.S., held right after Black Hat in Las Vegas.  For more information see their web site.