Ask Slashdot: Favorite Thing Out of This Year's Black Hat? 41
Nerval's Lobster writes "This year's Black Hat conference wasn't just about the NSA director defending his agency's surveillance practices (and getting a bit heckled in the process). Other topics included hacking iOS devices via a modified charging station, eavesdropping on smartphones via compromised femtocells, demonstrating a password-security testing tools that leverage AWS (and 9TB of rainbow tables) to crush weak passwords, and compromising RFID tags with impunity. What was your favorite news out of Black Hat?"
Why is it even called "Blackhat"? (Score:2, Interesting)
Just curious, why is the conference even called "Blackhat"?
According to Wiki (a very reasonable defintion): "A "black hat" hacker is a hacker who "violates computer security for little reason beyond maliciousness or for personal gain" (Moore, 2005). Black hat hackers form the stereotypical, illegal hacking groups often portrayed in popular culture, and are "the epitome of all that the public fears in a computer criminal". Black hat hackers break into secure networks to destroy data or make the network unusable for those who are authorized to use the network."
So instead of attending shouldn't the NSA be arresting the participants? Not that I actually favor such an act, but that appears to be the "legal" thing to do. Maybe it's better off called "Whitehat" or maybe "Greyhat" since the conference is partly about revealing new threats that concerned computer security experts can study and defend against?
Re:First credible way to detect real 0day on your (Score:2, Interesting)
HTTP server on non-standard port with (probably) proprietary freeware that requires IE to work. Sounds genuine to me!
SSL, gone in 30 seconds (Score:5, Interesting)