“Gamble? Not with your future”

By Lee Whitfield

Honestly, I’ve never been big into gambling. The closest I’ve come is buying a lottery ticket when I was 18. While I understand the excitement, the science, and compulsion, it has just never been a huge draw for me personally.

There are many things that fall into the category of gambling. You can choose to back your favorite sports team by putting your money where your mouth is. You may not have a lot of faith in your team and bet against them, and still call yourself a fan? You may attend a regular gathering of friends and play cards together.

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Gambling presents an inherent risk, hence the excitement. You run the odds in your head and determine if there’s a chance you’ll win. If the right combination of probability and odds come up, you pony up and hope for the best. However, there’s always a chance that something goes wrong and you walk away with a loss instead of a win.

You may not be familiar with Steve Richards. Why would you? He’s a roofer from the UK. Richards had a penchant for sports betting and accurately predicted the correct scores for twelve different rugby games. He bet 10 at some crazy odds and walked away with 38,970. Now, roofers in the UK probably don’t make that much in a year so this was an extraordinary win for him but instead of taking that money and doing something useful, he “reinvested” by placing a 30,000 on another Rugby game one week later. He lost. A year’s wages gone in an instant.

So why am I talking about gambling? Well, it is the start of a new year. New opportunities, new goals, new budgets. The likelihood is that you have some amount of money allocated to you for training purposes in 2019 and you have a to ask yourself a question. How do you spend that money wisely and not gamble it away on less-than-stellar instruction?

As you may know, I recently started teaching for SANS. I’ve had the pleasure of teaching in Boston, London and Denver. My next class is in Reno, Nevada — the gambling state. It starts on February 25. Here I will be teaching the FOR500: Windows Forensic Analysis class. In six days you’ll learn the skills needed to conduct investigations into a variety of cases and, to top it off, you’ll put the skills to the test with the forensic challenge that I helped to create. The FOR500 class is updated throughout the year so you’ll be learning about the latest and greatest artifacts to help you become a lethal forensicator, take down the bad guys, impress your bosses, and get that raise that you deserve.

As an added bonus, I’ll also be giving a brand new @Night talk entitled “Ready, Fire, Aim.” You won’t want to miss it.

So don’t gamble away your future, make the safe bet and come join me in Reno in February. Come to the class, hang out with me, learn some stuff, and play some slots. Who knows, you might walk away with more than the best training money can buy.

More information about the SANS Reno event
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