Learning to Discover, Contain, and Combat a Zero-Day Attack!

DevNet Express Event gets attendees hands-on with Cisco Security APIs

It is becoming a habit… for the last years, on the weekend before CiscoLive Europe, we run a 2-day DevNet Express (aka DNE) event focused on a specific architecture. Yes, you heard it right, on the weekend, Saturday and Sunday. Why? Because we are those people. We love programmability and having a couple of days to focus on learning about Cisco Security APIs is as good as it gets!

This year in Barcelona we decided to go for the new kid on the block, the Security DNE. And it looks like we hit the jackpot! Almost 100 attendees for an event happening on the weekend… it was huge! With half of them coming from a networking background, and the other half focused on security, it made up for the perfect diverse group. And of course, with that number of attendees we needed a big group of proctors as well, to answer questions or any kind of difficulties that might show up during the event.

On Saturday we started covering programming fundamentals, Python and REST APIs, so everyone could get up to speed on the required tools to leverage platform APIs. And by the end of the first day we were already working on Cisco Umbrella APIs… talk about a quick ramp-up!

Sunday was all about Cisco Security portfolio APIs, and we went through Firepower, Threat Grid, Advanced Malware Protection for endpoints, and Identity Services. It was a lot of ground to cover but attendees were really engaged. For each session there was an associated lab to practice what they had learned, and successfully completing those labs got you a stamp in your badge!

By the end of the second day we had a fantastic session putting it all together, so that attendees could work through a series of exercises to discover, contain and combat a zero-day attack… quite a trip!

If you are interested in doing some self-learning for the content delivered during the Security DNE, it is public and readily available for you here.

Accomplishing this great goal of getting familiar with Cisco Security APIs in such a short period of time sure deserved a good reward. So those attendees who completed every mission, and got all the required stamps, received a t-shirt, stickers… and a set of wireless earbuds!

Spending the weekend with such an amazing team really drove a number of interesting conversations. But we were really impressed by Jordi Perez’s testimonial, and how after attending this DevNet Express event he is rethinking his professional career: