Opening Remarks

Once again, GrrCon has come and gone. GrrCon is the largest convention I have attended, and it still has a community feel. My first year I went alone. The second year I attended with the #MISec community. This year I spent most of my time walking the halls and talking with people I know from #MISec meetups, past GrrCons, and from Discord, LinkedIn, and Infosec.Exchange. I don’t think I’ve spoken to as many people at any previous convention as I did this year. Below I cover how things went.

The Social Side of Things.

The social aspect of GrrCon has grown for me. What enriched my experience this year was being part of the local CyberSec/hacker community. I’m a member of the #MISec community in Ann Arbor; they host meetups in Southfield, Jackson, and Grand Rapids. Connecting with that group, attending talks together, and discussing sessions afterward made the convention more rewarding and helped maintain relationships throughout the year.

Continuing those connections in person facilitates knowledge sharing in ways quick online posts do not. The group’s Discord is also excellent — people discuss topics throughout the month. If you can, join a local group; if one doesn’t exist, start one. Keep it simple: host a social night with some drinks. Robert Wagner’s talk on the Importance Of A Third Place was relevant to this topic.

The Talks.

I attended 13 talks. All were well done and informative — check my notes if you’re interested. Of the keynotes, Louis’s was the most entertaining and thought-provoking. Kathy’s sessions are always worth seeing; they prompted me to reevaluate controls both at home and at work.

I didn’t take notes on Chris Roberts’s or Wolf’s talks, but both were excellent and made me think. As last year, I faced a scheduling conflict between two talks I wanted to attend; I’ll need to track down Adam Compton’s “An Old Hillbilly’s Guide to BASH for Pentests” and a longer video of Atlas of D00M’s “The Care and Feeding of CyberNinjas.” Robert Cioffi’s talk on recovering from a ransomware attack tied well into Cathy’s recommendations for incident response and backups.

My Own Tech

What didn’t work: Ghostwriter. I prefer writing notes in Markdown, and not having the touchpad active made note-taking awkward. After day one I installed Emacs with Doom Emacs, which made day two much smoother. I also discovered I have scattered notes across Joplin and my Nextcloud server and need to reorganize once the snow starts flying.

The Meshtastic activity was a standout. The most nodes I observed at one time was 51, including a few people who weren’t at the conference. It’s inexpensive and easy to get started with. Dave Schwartzberg’s Meshtastic Attacktastic demo highlighted how capable the platform is; I want to experiment more and try this project.

Also, this battery bank was fantastic and kept my laptop running all day. The internal battery might have lasted, but the external bank removed the risk and kept my phone charged too.

Final Thoughts

So will I be back next year, God willing yes. I always have a great time, meet great people, and learn new things. Conferences and talks give me new perspectives in my profession. I honestly can’t wait for next year.

73’s everyone.

My Notes From this Year