Russian Spy in Santa Barbara

Last few months I have spent in Boston and recently had an opportunity to come to awesome Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara is a motherland not only of the longest (or one of the longest) an American television soap opera, which was very well known in Russia in 90s, but also University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB).

How most of you know, UCSB, and particular the Department of Computer Science, organizes International Capture The Flag (also known as the iCTF), one of the oldest ctf contest. For our team also, it is one of the first CTF in which we started to participate, and there are few curious moments connected with it which happened last years: 2010 and 2011. So, because all of that I was very happy to come to UCSB and personally meet Professor Giovanni Vigna and his team, but first things first.

First of all, I want to show you a campus of UCSB which is huge and beautiful. The such concentration of skaters, bicycles and beautiful girls I had never seen before anywhere ).

I was literally waiting about 1 minute for crossing bicycle track because of bicycles’ traffic! Incredible!

This is a view which students of UCSB can see every morning!

and also you can walk around…

“Harold Frank Hall ” is a place where Security Lab is located, also called Engineering I.

How you can see at a map below, a campus is really huge.

Inside the Lab I met a lot of interesting and enthusiastic people )

A heart of lab:

After an excursion in UCSB Security Lab (and after I copied all flags for next iCTF 2012 for sure xDDD ), Giovanni and I went to Lastline’s office. Lastline is a security startup which is focused on research and development anti-malware solution “Previct” (you can find more information by link).

There I met another team with whom had a lunch and interesting conversation.

I think that anti-malware researchers and foosball are two inseparable things because almost in every virus lab which I’d seen I saw foosball table. Sometimes I think that the best place to recruit anti-malware analyst is foosball bar )) So, these guys are not exception! After lunch we had a short  game (I’m not going to tell you who won, but you know).

I really like campus of UCSB, and came there again in another day just to skating around and to enjoy the atmosphere of this place.

Finally, I want to say thanks for inviting to Professor Giovanni Vigna and his team. I really enjoyed to meet you and to spend time in awesome Santa Barbara! Looking forward to meet  you again.