I’m not a fan of early mornings, and I just had two in a row. That said this week has past reasonably quickly. On Thursday I attended a Sec-1 Applied Hacking & Intrusion Prevention course. It was a very broad one day course providing a taster of all the common security threats affecting most businesses, kudos to our instructor/lecturer, he REALLY knew his stuff.

There are some ‘hands on’ lab sessions where we got to have a go at using exploits and tools to ‘hack’ *shudder* an outdated Win2k server machine. Unfortunately, at the end of the course I couldn’t help but feel it wasn’t quite worth what was paid for me to attend (> £100/hr).

It opens your eyes to the ease with which you can penetrate an unpatched machine though. It also demonstrated how knowledgeable (and bored) elite black hat hackers are to find these exploits in the first place.

I’ve always hated the term hacking, the word instantly reminds me of the glamourised image movies always portray - which couldn’t be further from the truth. Real life hacking for anyone but your immature adolescent / hardcore socially inept nerd is extremely arduous and boring.

Why am I attending such courses? Well it seems the company I work for want to move into DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service. Can’t say I’m comfortable with this decision given the companies combined security knowledge; mine included.

I feel like I’ve learnt a lot as a developer in the last 12 months; increasingly though I am frustrated with PHP (my primary language that I have to use at work). I’ve spent several months researching other languages as a new home for my personal development efforts (no scope to move from PHP at work). I had my targets set on C#.

Prior to frequenting Channel9 I was quite the anti-MS/open source zealot. However I believe C# is a promising technology; with some interesting developments in the pipeline.

My only gripe is being tied down to Windows, which = £££ and forced upgrade cycles. I have installed mono but trying to use MS Visual Web Developer as an IDE (which is .NET 2.0 friendly) caused for a bit of conflict.