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Mobo maker First International give ATI's A3 chipset its first public outing at Comdex last week. The chipset will support AMD's Athlon XP processor. ATI has held open the prospect of a PC chipset for some time - ever since it was granted a Pentium 4 bus licence by Intel, in fact. That, plus ATI's desire to compete with nForce, the Athlon-oriented chipset from its arch-rival, Nvidia, suggested that ATI's part would support Intel processors. However, internal AMD roadmaps revealed in October that the chipset, codenamed A3, will support AMD's Athlon and Duron chips, a fact confirmed by the First International demo board. That's not to say that A3 won't support the P4 at some point, but AMD's line-up seems to dominate ATI's sights at the moment. Perhaps it feels that there's too much competition in the P4 arena already.

News source: The Reg
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Glennan says the course has had participants from Malaysia, and attracted a lot of enquiries from Asia and hopeful students from the Middle East who “due to the current political climate” chose not to attend.

With some government representatives and sensitive corporate clients wary of exposing organisational vulnerabilities in such an open environment, the course has sparked a lot of interest from those who would like to see it available as a more private than public forum – an avenue eSec says it will explore.

Glennan said there is also a lot of demand for the course to be tailored to specific company requirements, citing one organisation that wished to send 25 staff to the course.

Attendee feedback
According to Glennan, customer feedback has been excellent, with participants enjoying being in an environment where they could get their hands dirty.

“Surprise was probably the biggest response,” he said. “A lot of them [participants] have been flabbergasted at what can be done by hackers”.

He said that many attendees discovered what they considered to be “accepted security” was not as safe as they thought it to be.

Systems Engineer Pieter Berkel, who attended the course in Sydney, said he did so to learn about UNIX security.

According to Berkel, the course, which was held in a computer laboratory, was "very hands on”. Each attendee had their own computer terminal on which they could try out what they were being taught.

“One really cool feature was that between each computer, there was a screen hooked up to the demonstrator’s computer, so you could see exactly what he was doing while conducting the demonstration. At the end of the day, they had a small lab where they set up a challenge so the attendees could have a go at hacking using the skills they had learnt during the day,” Berkel said.

Despite only being able to attend a half-day of the course, Berkel said he definitely learnt a few things and uncovered security vulnerabilities that he wasn’t aware of in that short time. “I wish I was able to attend the full seminar,” he said.

According to Glennan, security software developer and trainer Foundstone - which has had a couple of years to perfect the course in the US - is “extremely pleased” with the attention the course has attracted in Australia and has found it worthwhile, at AU$4600 (plus GST) per participant -- half the price than it does back home, where attendees pay US$3995.

In a previous interview with ZDNet Australia, Foundstone president and chief technical officer, Stuart McClure said it wasn’t an issue of demand for security training courses in the Asia Pacific region, but an issue of supply. “We can’t keep up with the demand...we get two or three legitimate requests out of Asia Pacific every week,” he said.

Aware that Asia will be where a lot of the action is over the next few years, finding its feet, and a partner in Australia, was part of the company’s strategic plan.

Glennan also said that he expects to see a lot of consolidation within the security company in the coming months. “We can’t all go out and conquer the world,” he said.

And with similar philosophies and a lot of synergy between the two organisations, “I think you’ll find it’s going to be an extremely long-term relationship,” Glennan said of the partnership it struck with Foundstone, initially, for a term of around 18 months.