Back in November I had the chance to attend the Splunk .conf conference here in DC. One of the big after hours events of the conference is the Boss of the SOC (BOTS) competition that puts teams against each other to try and analyze a set of data to identify a variety of indicators of compromise from an incident. After a little bit of talking, Splunk decided to release the BOTS app as an open-source project.
So when I last left you guys I was attending Splunk .conf. My plan was to write each day but I quickly realized how long the day was when you included 9 hours of conference, plus commuting to and from DC each day so screw that.
So today was day one of Splunk .conf2017. This being my first time at .conf, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. The morning started off with the keynote address by the CEO of Splunk, Doug Merritt. A couple of interesting numbers to start with. 7,187 people were regestered to attend .conf this year from 65 countries who traveled a combined 65 million miles to get to Washington DC (enough miles to go to and from the moon over 100 times).
Today was the first (well sort of) day of the 8th annual Splunk .conf convention here in DC. .conf covers a range of topics, is three days (well really 2.5) long, has over 200 technical sessions, and includes over 6,000 participants. In short, its a bit of a data science nerd orgie.