Lessons from Cyber Security Symposium

Written by: Darci Lindgren

MidWest Tech Talk https://www.midwesttechtalk.com/ – A place for geeks I first discovered while craving Professional Development during covid isolation- puts on a Cyber Security Symposium every winter in Columbia, Missouri.  https://www.midwesttechtalk.com/cybersecurity/  

Conference theme was ‘Jurassic Tech’ with t-shirts and a bag full of swag centered around the Jurassic world movie- but with the T-Rex holding a computer mouse in its mouth. Participants were invited to bring the oldest technology they had for a showcase. Oldest(or coolest?) 3 items received awards at the end of the conference.

This event is geared more toward IT, or Lan Manager level staff.  Teachers wearing multiple hats, like me, are also welcome. Vendors are by invitation only, so all representatives are with companies the Tech Pro’s who put on the conference use themselves. Booths are set up around the largest room with dining tables. Breakfast and Lunch were provided both days. Thursday evening also had a vendor reception. 

On the first day of the conference, this room was also used for a ‘CTF’ or ‘Capture the Flag’ IT Cybersecurity competition as a 2 hour workshop with Weston George, Steve McMillin, and K12TechPro. It was interesting to participate in. They set up a dedicated local network, and participants joined. Challenges ranged from beginning to advanced IT levels and several ‘hacking’ tools were shared via a simple locally hosted web page. The leaderboard was displayed in the front of the room while about 50 nerds pounded away on their laptops. You could request help at the cost of some points, but few did. I ended up about in the middle of the group. The winner definitely knew his stuff.  Challenges ranged from computer and security history, to decoding passwords, and even some hexadecimal conversion. Answers were never revealed, so some mystery remains.  Top 3 in the game got a Jurassic World Lunch Box, one which also had several amazon gift cards inside.

The afternoon workshop of day 1 that I was able to attend covered developing an incident response playbook. Samples were shared, along with how districts have customized plans to suit their building while keeping things generic enough to be easily updated. Putting all contact information on one page, not buried in the full plan, was one way to make updating more streamlined and document more user friendly.