Keeping Up Your Knowledge in the COVID Era

  A little global pandemic led to a lot of changes in how we work and meet.  Video conferencing and virtual classrooms weren't new but they have certainly exploded and matured over the last year.  Fortunately, a lot of great people in the tech world saw the difficulties presented by the COVID era and took advantage of those technologies to give others the opportunity to keep their skills sharp or learn new ones.  Here are a few of those that I've experienced, including some that are still occurring.

PODCASTS

Life has no CTRL+ALT+DELETE - Hosted by smartphone forensics guru and SANS instructor Heather Mahalik.

Cache Up - Interviews with a wide range of digital forensics professionals.

3MinMax w/ Kevin Ripa - Bite-sized pieces of digital forensics knowledge.

Forensic Happy Hour - Drinks and chat with digital forensics experts.

CONFERENCES

National Cyber Crime Conference - Last year's conference made a quick transition to a virtual platform which continues this year.  There are a wide variety of sessions for investigators, prosecutors, and forensics personnel.

Magnet Virtual Summit - Speakers, labs, mentorship, and capture the flag contest.

SANS Summits - SANS has made their virtual summits free.  Catch talks from some of the top people in the information security community.

CornCon - The cybersecurity conference for the Quad Cities.

TRAINING

Wild West Hackin' Fest Anti-Syphon Training  - Has a series of three pay-what-you-can courses taught by John Strand of Black Hills Information Security:  SOC Core Skills, Getting Started in Security with BHIS and MITRE ATT&CK, and Active Defense & Cyber Deception.  John is a former SANS instructor and an incredible teacher.

The Cyber Mentor - An excellent resource for learning penetration testing at a low cost.  If you follow Heath on Twitter, you'll likely run across one of his frequent discount codes.

INE Starter Pass - Free introductory learning in networking, Azure, penetration testing, and data science.

PortSwigger Web Security Academy - Free web security learning and labs from the creators of Burp Suite.

BEST PLACE TO FIND THESE RESOURCES

DFIR Diva - Hands down one of the best places I've found on the web for DFIR resources, links to free and low-cost training, and DFIR learning for beginners.