Blog from September, 2018

NCSA's relationship with the Bro Project goes back to its earliest days of development, but the first NSF grant was awarded in 2010. The grant helped establish a stable development cycle as well as providing funds for workshops and conferences. NCSA hosted the first Bro Workshop in 2011 and went on to coordinate and host many more events for the project, at NCSA and other venues. Earlier this year we handed off the role of coordinating Bro events, which has given us the opportunity to reflect on lessons learned from hosting numerous open source software conferences. 

We have assembled a fairly comprehensive list of tasks and insights into hosting an event. The full list can be found here, but highlights include tips for building the event page, a sample sponsorship prospectus, and what requirements should be considered when picking an event venue.

Today NCSA's Justin Azoff gave a talk demonstrating a few tools written and used by the Cybersecurity and Networking Team. The talk was well attended by members of NCSA, Campus Security, Engineering IT, ESNet, and the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries (CARLI). The focus of the talk was on Bro, of which Justin is a member of the development team; and other tools developed in-house: Dumbno, SSH-Auditor, and Blackhole Router Site. To learn more about software development at NCSA, see our Github. Follow us on Twitter at @NCSASecurity.

Justin's work has been funded in part by NSF Award Number 1547249.

NCSA's Director of Cybersecurity and Networking, Adam Slagell, has accepted a position at ESNet as their Chief Security Officer.

Adam joined NCSA in 2003 as a security engineer. Over the 15 years he's worked for NCSA he was promoted to numerous positions, including CISO in 2012, and Director of the Cybersecurity Division in 2015 (which later merged with the Networking Division). In his time at NCSA he served as PI and Co-PI for numerous grants, co-managed the Bro Project in collaboration with the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at UC Berkeley, was security operations co-lead for the XSEDE federation, and led the team that created the first HIPAA enclave on the UIUC campus. Adam's contributions to NCSA and the UIUC campus have been numerous. We will miss his friendly face in the hallways, the coffee walks, and most of all his leadership. We wish him the best of luck in his new position!