2007
The myth of the expert
Something we preach very strongly in our training is the importance of
an understanding of the underlying technology / application / issues,
and being able to dig into the core of an issue, not just try a trick or
two and move on. Sadly, most people don’t see it this way.
It’s also somewhere between sad and frustrating for me that there seems
to be an over-abundance of so-called “experts” in our field. While this
isn’t an issue for those who have a deep understanding, the fact of the
matter is that for many of our customers, their key competence is their
respective industry, and not information security.
Feedback on our courses in Switzerland
We just finished presenting an HBN Bootcamp and an HBN Combat Edition in Lausanne, Switzerland. A lot of people don’t know that we do this format – small courses on location worldwide. Its a different vibe to the big courses we do at Black Hat and the like, but it has some real advantages. Here’s the feedback we received – I especially like the nice things they say about me…
reddit: exploit publisher?
saw this in my RSS reader, the null poison byte makes a comeback!
Until it gets fixed, you can view here.
Is that a robots.txt in your pocket or are you just ahppy to see me?
This will probably get cleaned up soon, but thats a huuuuuuuge robots.txt [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt]
I have always tried to keep this blog politics-free
but the last Scott Adams posting on the Iranian presidents US visit has to be the best piece i have read in a long long time..
BotNets not just for SPAM any more
The Symantec Security blog has an article titled “Botnets: not just for spamming anymore“. Interestingly we are now starting to see the use of botnets for more than just simple spamming (or simpler DoS attacks).
Its pretty cool (in a twisted sort of way), because this is one of those things we called out a long time ago, predicting that botnets were way under-used as a form of cheap distributed computing. We have been mentioning its potential for effectively minimizing the key-space of session-ids and it looks like its starting to rear its head..
Introducing Hex-Rays…
These days its almost impossible to read a book on security or vuln-dev without a gratuitous IDA-Pro screenshot. IDA has proven itself so valuable at reversing that its near impossible to find texts that fail to mention it. (Even ancient texts from fravia and woodman will make reference to it).
Well.. for a long long time people have wondered why ilfak (ida’s main author) didnt get into the point and click vuln finding / point-and-click disassembler business.. For a long time he (and datarescue stayed out of it), till now..
’twas only a matter of time before various FaceBook developers started cashing in on the amount of personal info they can collect…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/12/facebook_compare_people/
This was something Marco and I chatted about a few weeks ago – not from the “financial gain” perspective, but rather from the large amounts of data one would be able to collect from Facebook by playing with the FaceBook API. Unfortunately, there has been no time for fun and games yet…
Alas.. i could have made squillions (aka – Amazon MTURK)
In early 2002 i suggested that we could solve some computer problems and south africas street-kid problem by setting up a network of street=kids with basic education to handle tasks computers still struggled with. At the time we were concerned with low-false positive, agentless remote detection of defaced web-sites, but also ran into the idea when we first built e-or, our early web application scanner. I suspect i didnt broach the subject with enough sensitivity (and in retrospect suggesting that remote controls for automatic gates could be replaced by 2 low cost street-kids (one as a spare)) might not have helped my cause..
Defcon talks – Videos available online..
A recent maillist thread shows that the DC15 videos are anow available online [here]
Our video (although my voice sounded alot better in my head than it does on video) is available [here]