S4 is my favorite conference. This is mainly because it concentrates on industrial control systems security, which I am passionate about. I also enjoy the fact that the presentations cover mostly advanced topics and spend very little time covering novice topics.
This year’s conference was packed with top talent from the ICS and SCADA worlds and offered a huge amount of technical information. I tended to follow the “red team” track, as these talks broke varying levels of control systems networks.
Sergey Gordeychick gave a great talk on the vulnerabilities in various ICS software applications, including the release of an “1825-day exploit” for WinCC, which Siemens did not patch for five years. (The vulnerability finally closed in December 2012.)