Matt Anderson is the Director, EMEA at SANS Institute. In this interview he talks about SANS London 2012, Europe's biggest and most important information security training event.

SANS London 2012 is a huge security training event. What courses do you offer this year? How do you choose what courses to present?

It’s actually the largest security training event outside of the States and is already filling up fast. We try to include all of the most popular SANS courses whilst ensuring any new security challenges are covered as well. Our Security Essentials class is always hugely popular, but there are various specific courses covering pen testing, incident response, auditing, forensics and more. We’ve introduced two new courses as well this year – ‘mobile device security and ethical hacking’ and ‘advanced web app penetration testing and ethical hacking”.


The courses are developed through a consensus process involving hundreds of administrators, security managers and information security professionals. In short we try to ensure that the London event has the widest possible range of SANS training courses and then we run other more focused training events elsewhere across Europe, Middle East and Africa.

The full line up for SANS London this year is:

• SEC579: Virtualization and Private Cloud Security with Dave Shackleford
• SEC401: Security Essentials Bootcamp Style with Dr. Eric Cole
• SEC501: Advanced Security Essentials with Eric Conrad
• SEC503: Intrusion Detection In-Depth with Jess Garcia
• SEC504: Hacker Techniques, Exploits & Incident Handling with Steve Armstrong
• SEC546: IPv6 Essentials with Dave Shackleford
• SEC560: Network Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking with Bryce Galbraith
• SEC566: Implementing and Auditing the Twenty Critical Security Controls - In-Depth with James Tarala
• SEC575: Mobile Device Security and Ethical Hacking with Raul Siles
• SEC642: Advanced Web App Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking with Justin Searle