Based on the feedback forms from SANS, this year’s North American SCADA Summit in Orlando was the best in the history of the event. It started with our 5-day SCADA Security Course, and we had the most students to-date with 58 registered students. Dan and I, with the help of the SANS staff, were able to ensure that every student had power and Ethernet drops, and everyone worked through the hands-on labs with limited technical difficulties. Some of the PLC and OPC labs suffered through heavy network traffic, so we’ll need to bring even more gear next time, but in the end everyone was able to build their own SCADA systems and interact with the hardware we provided. Prizes were given out for the first students that wrote scrips to strobe the PLC outputs, and one student set the lights to “disco” mode, which complemented the music that carried over from the wedding party in the adjaccent room during one of the afternoon sessions.

With the summit starting strong from the heavily attended SCADA training, the rest of the summit kept the momentum going with excellent discussions and presentations. The INL crew stayed around after to offer the Basic and Intermediate free DHS training, and the latest version 2.0 of the Exposure to Closure theater event hosted by NERC was very engaging and thought-provoking.

The presentations and workshops that we provided at the summit will be available on the SANS web site, and they have also been uploaded here to the “Presentations” area of our web site. The hacking demonstrations and videos have been stripped out of the presentation when converting it to PDF, but if you are interested in the multi-media content, just contact us, and we can shoot you a link to that content as well.

Thanks to all that helped make this event a huge success!
Jonathan