Brian Donohue

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“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

DEFCON Round Up: The Good, The Bad and The Underage

DEFCON, the cash-only, aliases-welcome hacker conference took place in the moral vacuum of Las Vegas, Nevada this weekend, as it has every Summer since 1993. This year there was no shortage of controversial presentations and panel discussions. If you were short the airfare, the $150 entrance fee, gave up on the three hour line-ageddon to pick up your badge or – admit it – your boss (or spouse) just wouldn’t let you go, have no fear. The show was crawling with media, including computer security reporters and even the mainstream media (CBS and NPR were there). Here’s our round up of some of the major stories to come out of this year’s DEFCON conference. 


Global 2000 companies can be split into two categories, according to the author of a new white paper from McAfee (PDF); those that know they’ve been compromised and those that don’t yet know.“The only organizations that are exempt from this threat,” writes the paper’s author, Dmitri Alperovitch, “are those that don’t have anything valuable or interesting worth stealing.”

A new report from the BBC claims that Anonymous’s recent attack on The Sun’s website was more than the embarrassing defacement it appeared to be, and that in addition to posting a fake story, the group may have made off with the personal information of thousands of individuals that had entered into various competitions on that site.