SANS brings NetWars to BSidesLondon13

Date: Netwars is on April 25th 2013
Venue: Kensington & Chelsea Town Hall (Community Room 1
Registration: pre-registration on April 24th at the SANS stall. Tech requirements are mandatory (see below)

Thanks to SANS EMEA this year some BSidesLondon participants will get the opportunity to take part in NetWars. This in is a multi-level training program and fun competition that helps you develop and master skills. As you step through each level and validate that you have acquired the necessary skills, you get awarded points. Similar to a multi-player video game, you are competing against others to gain the highest number of points and win the tournament.

There are five levels in the program designed to help you develop skills in these critical arenas:
- Vulnerability Assessments - System Hardening - Malware Analysis - Digital Forensics - Incident Response - Packet Analysis - Penetration Testing

Although the program is called NetWars, it's not all about penetration testing. Rather, it's a blend of defensive - meaning system hardening, good secure system administration, analytics, malware analysis, forensic analysis -- and offensive, including vulnerability assessment and penetration testing. SANS tries to balance the content across the spectrum; not any one area dominates.

How to enroll
Registration for the event will be on the 24/04/2013.
You must bring your laptop, with VMware Player (free) or Workstation/Fusion (paid) installed on your computer on the day of the main event (mandatory).

Go to the SANS table, where you will be able to register after your equipment has been checked and approved. All participants of the Netwars challenge will be provided with a custom built virtual machine. This virtual machine is required to complete the initial level(s) of the challenge. Players that do not meet this requirement will not be allowed to participate as there will not be enough bandwidth nor time to download and install the VMware products on the day.

Ed Skoudis from SANS says "Participants should have foundational computer skills. Specifically, they should know networking, operating systems, especially Linux, and the fundamentals of how Linux is put together. They should understand Linux file systems and where things like browsers store things in the file system. No scripting knowledge is required. You can get through Levels 1, 2 and 3 without scripting knowledge. However, by the time you get to Level 4, it really helps to understand some scripting such as Python, or Pearl, or JavaScript, or some combination thereof."

This is a superb opportunity that can't miss! So see you Thursday!

@BSidesLondon team