I received a mailing for a blackhat.com Briefing & Training USA 2007 con. Searching the forum I didn't see much since 2003 regarding these "hacker cons". It doesn't look anything like a real "blackhat" event given its sponsors (Cisco & Miscosoft to name only two of many). It looks more like a white hat event to me, but when I brought it up with the network security coworker I was given an immediate evil eye and she walked away mid sentence on me like I was inviting her to a "hack the planet party" or something. It would seem that for any network security event "blackhats" would be an essential subject since they are indeed the opposing force, are they not?

Well, anyway, that was an awkward moment. Anybody been to one of these? I'm still totally green on this stuff, as my experience with intrusion has been very minimal at this point. I was hoping to get some feedback from a co...but that didn't work out.