Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 10:55:11 -0800 To: "Kris Stewart Ph.D." From: Kevin Carter Subject: Fwd: SANS Securing Windows conference - at SDSU! Kris, This information should probably be sent to members of the Senate as well as Faculty. What do you think? Kevin From: Felecia Vlahos Subject: SANS Securing Windows conference - at SDSU! IT Managers, We are moving forward with contracts now on a SANS Securing Windows conference for this August 6-11th. I mentioned this item several months ago in the IT Managers meeting and now it is becoming a reality. SDSU staff and faculty have been notified through the security and system administrators mailing lists of the dates and hopefully will be coming to you about attending. In my opinion, this is the best course taught in the world on securing windows. Students will learn how to build an Active Directory server from scratch and then how to apply security policies to protect desktop users. The course explains how to set up DNS, secure communications (no passwords in the clear), configuring IIS (web servers), Exchange (mail servers), and finally how to write custom scripts. Microsoft sends their employees to this course, since it is better than anything they can provide. The instructor, Jason Fossen, works directly with Microsoft to include the most up to date information in the course (software not even released yet). For additional information on the course, see this SANS link: http://www.sans.org/sans2006/description.php?tid=244 SANS conference visits San Diego about every 18 months and your staff can take this course at their conference for $3095 per person (this May for example). The course at SDSU is $1000 or less per person. This is a 66% savings and your staff will not have to travel to Shelter Island and pay parking. I know New Horizon's Windows operation courses for my IT staff are normally about $2000 a week. This course teaches operations in a secure manner, so they get more than what is taught at New Horizon's for half the cost! I hope to have registration information available within the next few weeks. Please start discussing the conference with your staff to arrange for funding and scheduling the time away from other duties. SANS recommends every student have a laptop configured with the latest Windows 2003 server software, so we will be working with a local vendor to have laptop rental information (somewhere in the neighborhood of ~$30 per day). The class hours are usually 9-5, but I have never seen a daily session end at 5:00 (usually 6 or 7). I have advised the staff we are still in the planning stages and other nightly events may be set up as well so they need to keep their calendars open for every evening if possible (such as a CSU discussion, etc.) Please support your staff by considering the funding from this years budget (about $1200 total per person), and by allowing them to have this time for the course without working additional hours in their normal duties. We hope to have excess revenues from this course, which will be applied back into SDSU and the rest of the CSU. So, sometime before August I will let you know if we can buy additional books for your staff and if we can reduce the cost of attendance even further. Thanks, Felecia Vlahos, CISSP Information Security Officer San Diego State University 619-594-4049, fvlahos@mail.sdsu.edu