This blog is a shameless attempt to plug two things that I will be involved with soon that y'all may like to know about (they're also largely why my blog has died down again - my apologies for those who read it - I've been busy).

1. In June, I will be speaking at the FIRST (Forum of Incident Response Security Teams) Annual General Meeting in Seville, Spain to an audience of between 500-700 attendees.  The topic will be timely - I will talk about the recent targeted attacks on specific customers involving Office 0-days.  I will be demonstrating one such former 0-day (patched in the February release) and show how if it runs as an administrator on an un-patched version of Office 2003 it drops malware on the machine (backdoor / rootkit).  I'll talk about what we're doing about this situation and what you can do to mitigate threats like this (hint - not running as administrator is a big deal).  FYI registration is open for this conference and even though FIRST is a membership based organization - this is one of the conferences they hold that non-members can actually attend.  It's going to be a great conference this year - probably the best in the organizations history (there are some great speakers attending - and I don't just mean me! :)) and if you have budget - I highly recommend attending this one.  More information about the conference can be found here: http://www.first.org/conference/2007/
2. In April (hopefully sooner - F1 season is starting!) I'll  I'll be submitting my final draft for Chapter 9 (Stealth software chapter) of the up-coming Hacking Exposed series of books.  I am . . . honored, to say the least, to be able to contribute to this series of books.  When I first started to work in the security field professionally this was the series of books I recommended to all of my colleagues at Microsoft so I'm actually quite proud to have been asked to contribute to this book and hope I don't let anyone down <G>.  Besides - I know and have tremendous respect for some of the other authors of the other chapters.  It's going to be the best Hacking Exposed book yet (hhmmm I'm detecting a theme in this blog post - everything I am involved in is the best yet!  It's coincidence - surely. :))

Finally - I've outted myself - I'm a huge F1 fan . . . if any the folks reading this blog are F1 fans - feel free to drop me a line and let me know - I'm assuming you'll be from somewhere other than the U.S. and I always love to hear from folks in other countries who are passionate about their motorsports. :)