At the end of July last week, per usual, masses of hackers, researchers and security reporters descended on Las Vegas to discuss the latest hacks, vulnerabilities and present new research.
Gen. Keith Alexander, the Director of the National Security Agency gave the keynote to the conference on Wednesday. The tense speech drew its fair share of detractors and hecklers over the course of an hour.
VIDEO Gen. Keith Alexander at Black Hat
MORE NSA Director Defends Surveillance Activities During Tense Black Hat Keynote
Trey Ford, the general manager of Black Hat USA 2013 led a Q&A with Gen. Alexander following his keynote.
Image via Black Hat Events' Flickr photostream
German security researcher Karsten Nohl demonstrated his SIM card attack in a talk on Wednesday. The attack makes quick work of the old, weak encryption that millions of cell phones still use in their SIM cards.
MORE Weak Encryption Enables SIM Card Root Attack
MORE SIM Card Vulnerability Could Affect Hundreds of Millions of Cell Phones
Black Hat USA 2013 was one of the larger conferences in the show's history, with more than 7,000 attendees.
Image via Black Hat Events' Flickr photostream
The judges for this year's Pwnies Awards posed on Wednesday. From right to left: HD Moore, Alex Sotirov, Brandon Edward, Dino Dai Zovi, Justine Aitel, Chris Valasek and Mark Dowd. Held each year at Black Hat, the Pwnies commemorate the best and worst in security industry.
Image via Black Hat Events' Flickr photostream
Ralf-Phillip Weinmann of the University of Luxembourg discussed a new functionality in Blackberry 10 called QUIP on Wednesday. While turned off by default, the functionality is designed to gather data and ship it off to BlackBerry.
Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive led a panel discussion on legal access, wiretapping and national security on Wednesday.
MORE Surveillance, Legal Access Could Weaken Internet Infrastructure
Kahle was flanked by Alan Davidson, left, a Visiting Scholar at MIT's Sloan School of Management who formerly served as the Director of Public Policy for Google and Matt Blaze, middle, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose research generally centers around security and privacy.
Jeff Forristal, the CTO at Blue Box Security described the steps that went into discovering the Android Master Key vulnerability and how they reacted when someone was able to reverse-engineer a patch for it and discover the vulnerability.
VIDEO Jeff Forristal on the Android Master-Key Vulnerability
MORE Android Master Key Malware Emerged Before Official Patch Details
READ Black Hat 2013: What Have We Learned
READ Black Hat Aftermath: A Broken, Battered Internet
Image via Black Hat Events' Flickr photostream
Scenes from this year’s hacking conference in Las Vegas, Nev. include a keynote by General Keith B. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency and talks by researchers Karsten Nohl and Ralf-Phillip Weinmann.
