Hack In The Box 2007

I’m in Kuala-Lumpur now. Today was first day of HITBSecConf2007. It begun with a keynote address by Lance Spitzner. Lance spoke about Fast-Flux (if unfamiliar with the term: it is a quite robust and effective bad guy’s solution to do bad things using fast IP changing hosts). I believe Lance is doing a great job by bringing this subject and increase awareness of the issue which really need to be addressed.

Second keynote address was done by Mikko Hypponen. Anyone accusing Kaspersky of crying wolf – put your hands off Eugene! Go listen to Mikko and you’ll realise then that is just a sort of professional side-effect or something :) Mikko’s talk, Online Crime and Crime Online, can be summarized as: current situation is bad and it is getting worse.

I particularly like his remark about talented guys from the middle of Siberia or rural China to be doomed to join the Dark Side because of lack of opportunities. Huh. It was too tempting to comment that actually I was born in the middle of Siberia (well, he was reffered to “talented guys”, but anyway) However I’ve decided not to, because it might be a bit dodgy to hear such comment from a guy with a phone attached to a yellow Symantec strip :)

Another surprising Mikko’s remark was a by-the-way-style one about F-Secure discovered Sony BMG rootkit in 2005. Everybody know it was Russinovich, so let assume that I simply misunderstood Mikko here.

There were another interesting talks during the day as well as booooooring ones. I would not give names for latter but for interesting I would highlight Raoul Chiesa and Alessio L.R. Pennasilico on Hacking SCADA, and Stefano Zanero on 360° Anomaly Based Intrusion Detection. I also have picked up couple interesting thoughts during Raffael Marty’s talk on Insider Threat Visualization.

On a side note, I personally hate these track splits at conferences, especially if there is no printed material.

Read also: HITB 2007, Day 2