Literatecode

Read also: HITB 2007, Day 1

The beginning of the last (second) day was all about old school, keynoted by Mark Abene (Phiber Optik) and by Eric Gordon Coley (Emmanuel Goldstein). They both talked about what happens to be already an ancient history for majority of audience. The good thing both speakers brought a subject that the true hacking is about curiosity and learning and not about gimme-exploit-to-crash’em-all.

Beside of couple flashbacks during these keynotes, I also thought about funny difference in mentality and approach to address the same urge we all faced back then. I’m talking about the urge to talk, to communicate to someone remote, to someone from far away. But we preferred to construct and make our own communication devices instead of phreaking and abusing someone’s equipments. At my home it was as simple as going to a Station of Young Technicians and joining a collective ham radio for free. Anyone may later get a license and build his very own station. We did whole long-distance networks back then! After all, Wi-Fi is nothing but just a very fast RTTY ;)

Going back to the subject, the next talk was very hard to choose. Window Snyder was at Track 1 and Dino Covotsos with Bluetooth toys at Track 2. As I said before, I hate track splits exactly for such situations. Well, geekish as it sounds, I choose Bluetooth over a lady. Hacking the Bluetooth Stack for Fun, Fame & Profit was a nice sum-up of current tools to mess with Bluetooth.

Another particular talk I would like to highlight was Slipping Past the Firewall by Billy K. Rios and Nathan McFeters. They talked about using various client side attacks to attack remote system. I believe it is an interesting talk for anyone who thinks XSS is that harmless :)

I would not write about other talks in details, because this post would become a long essay. In general it was a good conference. I was surprised to see that some previously research (0-day if you wish) stuff is public now and script-kiddied to such extent. I also was surprised to see that some so-called hackers so easily claim someone else’s credits. Seriously, what is so cool about this? It is simply ridiculous. Well, maybe I’m missing something here or just too old for this.

Anyway, it was nice to attend the conference.

upd Conference slides are online. There are no slides from Window Snyder’s talk. Curiously, Hipponen’s slides are censored. It is not the same presentation he’ve used during the talk. Wonder what happened with that silly Sp0raw story for example? :)