CornCon: Local IT security convention

Today I attended CornCon, a local day-long IT security convention. It was a pretty neat experience.

Upon arrival, I got a bag with some interesting promotional materials on various security-related products. In the conference room, I helped set up PowerPoint to automatically run and loop a slideshow. (I guess security people aren't all PowerPoint users, heh.)

There were two presentations going on at most times. I went to these:

• The keynote, a tour of how we're able to modify ourselves and other living organisms in surprising ways
• An update on a law case, FTC vs. LabMD, in which the Federal Trade Commission did some pretty strange stuff in regard to data security
• An overview of precision farming and NIST-published security processes for all organizations
• A definition of the Internet of Things, and an introduction to the security considerations for it
• A strategy for adopting cloud solutions and explaining those solutions to non-technical branches of a company
• A mostly non-OS-specific review of the poor state of mobile device security
• A short panel on careers in the IT security field
• A history of computers as weapons of war: cyberweapons used to physically cause damage
• A demonstration of a mild vulnerability in several Windows hooking libraries (RWX pages at constant addresses)

There was a door prize drawing for all kinds of swag. I got a $50 coupon for No Starch Press, which should be great!