I returned this past weekend from SOURCE Boston, where I presented the new features and architecture of Fireshark v2.

I have had the opportunity to speak at many conferences before, but this was my first time doing so in my university town of Boston (Northeastern), and my first time speaking at SOURCE. SOURCE has conference locations in Seattle, Barcelona, and Boston, and attempts to bring security experts together to create a very positive mix of business needs and technology expertise. Boston is a bustling city with a number of technology companies and top universities. The location alone is worth the visit.

That aside, I was impressed with some of the presentations I saw. Here are a few worth mentioning, which are available online at http://www.sourceconference.com/boston/speakers_2011.asp:
 

• On The Use of Prediction Markets in Information Security - Dan Geer, Alex Hutton, Greg Shannon
• The Exploit Intelligence Project - Dan Guido, iSEC Partners (great talk!) 
• Incursion - From Internet To SCADA, Critical Systems Compromise Case Studies in Pictures - Val Smith, Attack Research, and Chris, SecureDNA 
• Fuel for pwnage: Exploit kits - Vicente Diaz and Jorge Mieres, Kaspersky Lab
• Reverse Engineering Flash Files with SWFREtools - Sebastian Porst (Flash analysis tool released!)
• Reversing Obfuscation - Adam Meyers, SRA International
• Streamline Incident Types for Efficient Incident Response - Predrag Zivic and Mike Lecky, Canadian Tire (really interesting talk on identify tracking)
• Network Stream Hacking with Mallory - Raj Umadas, Jeremy Allen, The Intrepidus Group (Mallory is a tool worth checking out!)
• Adding another level of hell to reverse engineering - Ben Agre, Raytheon (Something as reverse engineers that we'll have to become acustomed to more and more: used junk code!)

and finally...

My presentation: Fireshark v2 - An Analysis Toolkit for Malicious Web Sites - Stephan Chenette, Principal Security Researcher, Websense Labs (to be publicly available on or before May 5)

(Figure 1: Stephan Chenette introducing Fireshark v2, an analysis tool kit for malicious websites)

I want to thank Stacy Thayer,  SOURCE founder, the SOURCE advisory board and all attendees.

(Figure 2: SOURCE founder, Stacy Thayer)