 Welcome back, everyone. So for the last couple weeks, I've been traveling around to different conferences and workshops, and it got me thinking about what conferences and workshops actually are and how new people would actually start to get into the conference scene and start interacting and why you would want to in the first place. So today, I'm going to talk about getting into digital forensics incident response and a specific aspect of it, which is conferences and workshops. And this is the time of year where a lot of conferences are going on and why you might want to start going to these conferences. If you look on Twitter, you'll see that there's a different conference almost every week, and it can be really overwhelming to try to pick the right conferences for you and what your goals are. So hopefully, this will help you think about conferences and workshops a little bit differently. So first off, what is the point of conferences? And by far, the main reason that people go to conferences in information security, digital forensics is to meet people. The community globally is actually pretty small. It is growing. We are getting a lot more people, but really the whole point of going to these conferences is to meet people and to put a face to the name because you might have seen them online. You might have talked to them or even worked with them before online, but you finally want to meet them. And whenever you meet these people, first off, they get to know you, you get to know them. And then that builds trust. And in information security and digital forensics, everything is based around trust. If you show up to these conferences, people start to know you, people start to know your work, then people will trust you more. And the more that you see other people, you'll also trust them. And whenever you trust each other, then business opportunities will come up. Or cases, for example, in criminal investigations. If you already know a law enforcement officer in another country, you're more likely to go talk to them directly in an informal communication whenever you have a case with their country. So building that trust is by far the most important aspect of going to conferences, like understanding who's in the field, what they're doing, and then building that trust. Other than meeting people, building trust, having a good time, maybe partying a little bit is to learn something. All these new people, all these experts are coming to the conference, and they're willing to share something, which means that if you just listen, you can definitely learn something. So going to learn something is definitely the point. And then practicing teaching. For most conferences, you can submit proposals for something you want to talk about. And if you're accepted, then you can also present at the conference. Now, this lets you practice teaching, which is so important for, first off, meeting people and building trust, because they'll come talk to you about your topic. But also just to give you more credibility, because you can say that you've been speaking at these conferences, you've been teaching people about digital forensics concepts or information security concepts. And then that will help you to get your name out there and let people know about you and build that trust. So then whenever people are looking for candidates for work, for example, you can say, yeah, I've talked at these conferences before, I had presentations accepted, and I've given talks at these conferences in front of 200 people or whatever. That'll really help you stand out, because it's very difficult to put a presentation together and then get up amongst your peers and give a presentation about something. That's kind of hard to do. And it will show that you have a lot of different skills, not just the technical skills, but also the communication skills that are so important in digital forensics and information security. There's a couple of different types of conferences. One is a community focused conference where a couple of people in the community just got together and said, hey, we want to run a conference. Anyone who has a topic on a specific thing, submit it, and we'll probably present it. These community conferences are usually local. So you might have a local group of people who are just interested in a specific topic that might run a conference every year where people in the local community just bring their presentations, whatever topic. It's very informal usually. And it's just basically people who like the topic getting together and talking about it. That's essentially it. And then there's usually a lot of parting that goes along with it. Commercial conferences are a little bit different, still kind of informal. But the commercial conferences obviously tend to focus more on the company that is hosting the conference. So if there's a company hosting a conference, they're going to talk a lot more about tools, like their specific suite of tools or whatever it is that they offer, and then have themes that are related to those tools. And then usually you'll see in each session, there's at least one talk by the company itself talking about how their solutions can do these things. So commercial conferences are a little bit of a mix between advertising and community. They still tend to be a little bit less formal, but they also tend to be better funded. So you tend to get some pretty good presentations coming out of it, where they're bringing in people from all over to give kind of at these expert level presentations. So commercial conferences and community conferences, you yourself can submit a proposal if whenever they have their call for presentations, you can submit a proposal and I'll talk about how you submit those in a second. Academic conferences are by far kind of the weirdest, oddest group of conferences. Academic conferences usually have a paper. There's very paper or a poster. You usually have to do a full academic research paper. The conferences are very specific to some topic. And then your research has to be like academic quality research. It can't just be something that might go into like a blog post. It has to be a little bit more than that. Academic conferences are kind of an industry in themselves. So they are a little bit strange. You don't usually see commercial participation too much in academic conferences. It tends to be people in universities, obviously, because they need to submit their papers and present it and get it published. And then there's diplomatic conferences. And I was in a police conference a couple weeks ago and it was very much diplomatic. So they wanted presentations that were technical. They also wanted me to chair panel sessions. And I knew that this was more of a diplomatic conference because the panel sessions were with high level decision makers in international policing organizations. They are going to be a lot more diplomatic strategic planning level and a lot less about the technical level of investigation. Usually whenever you're going to a diplomatic conference, you probably know it just based on who the guest list is. And just look at the presentations that are being submitted. So if it's a community conference, the presentations are going to be presentation titles, at least are going to be a lot more funny, I find. So community and commercial tend to be, like I said, a lot more laid back. Academic conferences are going to have a very formal sounding presentation title, usually. And then very formal presentation style because it is an academic conference. And then the diplomatic conferences are basically about cooperation and things like that. Most likely, if you're going to be submitting something, you're in the community commercial or possibly academic conference style. Those are the easiest by far to get into. Academic is a little bit harder because you do have to have that research behind you, either a full paper or a poster. But all of them have their own benefits depending on what you're trying to do with conferencing. Each of them attract a different type of researcher in the field. So workshops, a little bit different. Workshops are often ran with conferences. So in a conference, you might see like one or two days set aside for a specific type of workshop. But not always. Some workshops are just completely on their own. And the whole goal is to do something. And this is where we actually work on something. So workshops are a bunch of people coming together, either experts or just people with an interest and then they work on some paper or some standard or they're trying to achieve some sort of goal where a conference is very passive. You can go and just listen to the presentations and then maybe you learn something. Workshops, you're actually participating and contributing to whatever it is that they're working on. So how all of this works. Most conferences have a registration fee. It seems like the trend, at least during COVID, a lot of things went online and the online versions of the conferences tended to be free. I don't know if that's going to keep up or not, but whenever you do in-person conferences, they tend to have a registration fee. The registration fee usually is waived for accepted speakers. So especially for community and commercial conferences, if you're a speaker at the conference, most likely you get into the conference for free. Now it might not cover anything else. So you still might have, if you go there, you might have hotel, you have your travel costs and things like that, that won't be covered, but it will cover the conference registration fee, which is usually a couple hundred dollars at least. The exception to that and the reason that I say academic conferences are weird is because academic conferences, if you're accepted, then you have to pay more. So almost always, whenever you get your academic paper accepted to a conference and then you're going to present on it, then you actually get hit with more fees than if you're just going to attend. So academic conferences are kind of the backwards version of all this. So invited speakers are often paid. If the conference is asking you to come, even if you didn't submit a proposal, normally the incentive to do that is because you'll get your flights and hotel covered. You might not get a stipend. I know some conferences I've worked with offered like, you know, a three or $400 stipend to invited speakers, but they would also cover the flights and hotels, which is usually quite a lot. So it's good to be an invited speaker, but that's totally up to the conference. So the more presentations you get, the more likely you are to be an invited speaker in another conference, which is another good thing about presenting at conferences. You know, usually if you're speaking, at least you don't have to pay to join the conference because you are participating. All of that is true except for academic conferences where you will be paying for everything. So the way that you would get into the conference is to prepare a talk proposal or a paper, basically pick a conference that you're interested in, hopefully a little bit in advance. And then they will, you know, at the same time, pretty much every year have a call for proposals or a call for papers. If it's an academic conference, it's almost always a call for papers. You submit your paper, and then if the paper is accepted, then you do a presentation on that paper. Your presentation is at the conference, and then your paper is published to an academic journal. If it's a local conference, like a community conference, you prepare a talk proposal whenever they have their call for proposals, and you just submit it to the community and they either accept it or reject it. And that's pretty much it. Usually for community or commercial conferences, you just have to create like one paragraph description of what you're going to talk about whenever you give your proposal. For academic conferences, it usually has to be a little bit more. Normally presentations are 25 minutes, but I've also seen some conferences up to about 50 minutes. The entire slot is around 30 to 60 minutes. And then you have five to 10 minutes for questions. You should always leave a little bit of time for questions. And you also need to figure out your style. So whenever you're preparing your presentation, whatever it is, I recommend going through, for example, if you have slides, go through your slides and see if you are too fast or too slow. Most of the time, whenever people get into the conference, they've prepared for 25, they've prepared a 25 minute presentation, but then they will speak faster than they should. So then their 25 minute conference becomes 15 minutes. What you need to try to do is get used to pacing yourself, go through your conference notes, your presentation and make sure that you're actually hitting about 25 minutes and then have a little bit more on top of that just in case you went too quickly because people do tend to speak faster whenever they're in person. Once you give your proposal, the proposal is reviewed by whatever the board is and you either get an accept, a reject or revise. Revise might be just based on the notes from the reviewers or you might have something called a shepherd that helps you to correct and meet your revisions and then signs off on your final version once it's finished. Accept, obviously, you just get your concept accepted and then you need to prepare your entire presentation off of your paragraph that you prepared. If it's a reject, don't worry about it. Maybe your topic just didn't fit that conference's needs. It's not that it's a bad topic. It just might have been a little bit outside of the scope of what they're trying to achieve and a lot of the conferences I've worked on, they get a lot of submissions. So we end up having to reject sometimes up to 75% of the proposals. So don't feel bad if you get a reject from a conference. Just even take that same concept, propose it somewhere else. And if you keep using the same concept and getting rejected, you might take a look at what conferences you're submitting it to. If the conference is really specifically about honeypots, then it might not make sense to submit a reverse engineering proposal to a honeypot conference. There's kind of a linkage there, but maybe that's not what they're focused on. So you might instead go to something like digital forensics that might be interested in reverse engineering. So some tips for this. First off, understand your audience. A lot of people give presentations at conferences and just don't understand their audience at all, especially with academic conferences. They really talk about what's in their paper and they don't give the audience enough context to know really what's going on. And they also don't make presentations very entertaining, a little bit of entertainment. You don't want to be a joker up on stage, but making the presentation as entertaining as possible will really help you to stand out and keep people interested. Another thing is what is basic to you is new to other people. No matter what you're talking about, you do have something to contribute, right? So everyone has something to contribute. You might not be the most cutting edge research in the world, but it's still interesting to some people, and especially in digital forensics, what we're interested in is just understanding a new concept, for example. So if you look at some really basic data structure of a new program that's out, that's going to be immediately useful to investigators. So don't think, oh, this is a very simple piece of research that I did. Nobody's interested in this data structure. That's not true. A lot of people will be interested in it, and it might be immediately practical and usable for investigators. So if something is basic to you, it's going to be new to other people. So just, if you think it's interesting, try to propose it as a talk. It's very likely to be accepted, especially in a community conference. And then post your presentation online, on your blog, whatever it is. So usually you have presentation slides, notes, whatever it is. Post them on your blog in some sort of searchable format like PDF, and then write a blog post about your presentation. So talk about what you actually did in the conference. First off, it'll bring more people to you. People can see that you're actually giving talks about a specific topic in conferences, and then that'll bring more people to you about that topic. So then people can follow up, people can learn more, and people who didn't join the conference can also learn about whatever your topic is. So post your presentation, and then I also recommend you write a blog post about what you did at the conference and your presentation summary. And also ask the conference organizers might have funding for students, law enforcement, or military, or might be able to give discounts. So if, especially if you can show that you don't have the money for, you know, travel in hotels or something like that, they might be able to waive the conference fees. Now everything else might be on you, but at least you can kind of get a reduction in that. It's always worth it to ask and see if they have any of these discounts. If you're working for, you know, a for-profit company, you're probably not going to get one of the discounts, but if you are, especially students, but sometimes law enforcement, military, you might get a discount. So it's always worth it to ask, you never know. Some big tips because conferences are for meeting people. The whole goal is to talk to as many people as possible. And whenever I say that people are like, ah, but I hate talking to people, especially after COVID. People haven't been talking and they're kind of still, you know, socially awkward and shy. All I can say is that if you're doing an in-person conference, most of the reason you're there is to try to meet people and just understand who they are and what they're doing. So if you're shy, try to find a friend before going that can introduce you to other people. So find somebody who's already in the community who already knows these people and then ask them, like if you know that they're going to the conference, maybe they've posted on Twitter saying, oh, I'm going to this conference, I'll see you there. If you're also going to that conference, write to them and say, hey, I'm new in this area. I've never been to this conference before. I see you on Twitter all the time. Can we meet and you can like show me and introduce me to people and show me how to like work with this community? That's what you want to do. Try to find somebody who will help you basically get in with all these people. And I've seen a couple people in information security, but a lot of people in digital forensics that if you just go up to them and say, oh, I've seen you online. Can you introduce me to people? I don't know where to begin. A lot of people will help you. I think the digital forensics community is very, very helpful in that way. Just approach somebody who you've basically seen on Twitter or wherever and they'll definitely take you around. And if you see me at a conference, come up to me and I'll take you around and introduce you to anyone I can. But the big thing about that is whenever you're at the conference, don't be a jerk. Don't be sexist. Don't be creepy. Like all of these different things. Now being socially awkward is totally normal, but there are definitely boundaries. And just try not to be a jerk because it can have the opposite effect, right? If you go to a conference and everyone that meets you at that conference thinks that you're a jerk, then you're going to be kind of excluded from the community. People aren't going to want to work with you. If anyone finds out that you've been sexist or abusive at the conference, people will just shut you off immediately, right? So whenever you go to conferences, be friendly, be polite, just try not to be a jerk, okay? And that goes for being pushy. So a lot of people you meet at the conference will, they have their full-time jobs and things like that. And if you're excessively asking them to do something for you, then it'll come off as kind of being pushy and being a jerk. People will definitely help you, but up to a certain point. So don't take advantage of the community's kindness. So that was a little bit about conferences and workshops. I hope this information was interesting for you, especially if you are trying to get into these conferences and workshops. Leave a comment down below. If you have any questions, I'll try to answer them. I'll also post links below about some conferences and workshops that I know I'm going to be attending this year. So go check those out. And if you see me at any conference, come up and talk to me, and I will give you some free digital forensic science stickers. So that's it for today. Thank you very much.