RSA was a blur of Gold room 303, Green room 102, Orange room whatever…

I flew back to Chicago early last night to beat the winter storm that is now lashing Chicago with 40 mph wind gusts and an expected 3 – 6 inches of snow. I’m not sure which is causing my fuzzy head more, the fact that I got home at 2:30 am or the fact that I went from a sunny 55 degree environment to a windy 2 degree environment.

It’s snowing sideways. I want to go home and have some vietnamese noodle soup, a hot shower, and a warm bed. In that order.

RSA may not be the mecca of technical knowledge but it certainly is a
great place to brush shoulders with folks and make new contacts.

After complaining to a friend here about one of our service providers,
he said ‘I sat between their CISO and Security Director at dinner last
night.’ So I arranged a meeting with the Director and aired out my
grievances and was pleasantly surprised to hear that he arranged for a
meeting with the CISO in the morning, at which time he plans on having a report of action already taken. (more…)

First and foremost, I have to say the bloggers meeting tonight was scheduled to conflict with a keynote from one of my favorite authors; Ray Kurzweil. It didn’t click until today, when I had to decide which to attend and Ray won. So I haven’t gotten to meet the bloggers I chat with online.

Adding insult to injury, I’m in a holding pattern right now by one of our service providers, who want me to do some work tomorrow and are promising details tonight…I’m hoping I can do the work tonight and make my 8:00 am session tomorrow. To make matters even worse, the provider sucks ass and we’re married to them by contract… To give you an idea of just how horrible they are, just yesterday they requested that we reduce the security of our network by opening up one of our firewalls for a particular host “to eliminate the firewall as the problem.” I lost my patience at that point and the call went south very rapidly. (more…)

I’ve posted more pictures from the conference to flickr.

I’ve tagged them all “RSA2007″ to make them easily searchable (and I’m not the only flickr member doing this):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcwresearch/tags/rsa2007/

Presenter: Eugene Kaspersky of Kaspersky Labs

The room was packed for this one–standing room only. Eugene first
took us through the history of viruses in an effort to define who
writes them and why. He said the traditional viruses as we know them
are dead and we’re now seeing viruses for hire. The same trend that is
funding spyware is funding viruses; professional hacking. (more…)