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"Distrust and caution are the parents of security" - Benjamin Franklin
The names that teams choose to represent themselves in the various tournaments at DEFCON say a lot. Here’s a shot of the score board for the Open CTF tournament. My favorite: ADRIAN LMAO, a jab at the now-(in)famous hacker who is responsible for turning Bradley Manning in to the federal authorities.
Competition in the CTF contests is intense, with teams of hackers “wired in” (as they might say in The Social Network) and crowded around tables filled with laptops, cabling, soda, booze and junk food. Age is no obstacle, either, with some of the most skilled and technical hackers unable to legally buy a beer. This is a shot of one fresh-faced team at the official CTF tournament.
Capture the Flag: A DEFCON tradition, the annual Capture the Flag (CTF) competition pits some of the world’s best teams of hackers against each other in an epic struggle for supremacy (and bragging rights). This shot is from the Open CTF tournament – an “all comers welcome” alternative to the official CTF, which teams must qualify for through a series of elimination rounds.
NSS researcher Dillon Beresford continued his research into the security of SCADA and industrial control systems with a talk on vulnerabilities in Siemens Step 7 programmable logic controllers.
Carnegie Mellon University researcher Alessandro Acquisti spoke at Black Hat on the “Faces of Facebook,” in which he discussed research showing how facial recognition software can be used to unite disparate silos of public and private data online, creating a comprehensive, Minority Report-style identity profile that’s linked to an individual’s appearance.
Google’s new Chrome OS might not be running many devices out there on the ‘net, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fair game for hackers. How vulnerable is it to attack? That was the subject of Matt Johansen and Kyle Osborn’s “Hacking Google Chrome OS” at Black Hat on Wednesday.Read more: Researchers: Square Card Reader Provides Straight Line to Illicit Cash?
Richard Thieme, the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the security community holds forth during his Black Hat talk:
“Staring into the Abyss: The Dark Side of Security and Professional
Intelligence.” Thieme, an IT security consultant and published author, had a
tough message, telling them that the world is “grey. Nothing is as binary as
our code, which is hackable.”
It just keeps getting bigger – with all the news about stealthy cyber attacks on U.S. corporations and the government, it should be no surprise that both Black Hat and DEFCON had record attendance again this year. Among the notables: organizers at DEFCON running through their allotment of 10,000 coveted “human” attendee badges in a matter of hours on Friday, the first day of the show.
Former Microsoft executive Steven VanRoekel will succeed current Chief of Information Technology officer Vivek Kundra, the White House announced Thursday, according to a report in The New York Times.
Google has fixed 30 bugs in version 13.0.782.107, the latest build of its Chrome browser, pushed to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux today.14 of the bugs are deemed high-risk, including cross-origin script injection, HTML range handling and URI handling issues. Nine of the bugs are rated medium priority while just seven are rated low.
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