In one week, it’s 44CON time again! One of our favourite UK hacker cons. In keeping with our desire to make more hackers, we’re giving several sets of training courses as well as a talk this year.

Training: Hacking by Numbers – Mobile Edition

If you’re in a rush, you can book here.

We launched it at Blackhat USA, and nobody threw anything rotting, in-fact some said it went pretty well; our latest addition to the Hacking by Numbers training.

We created the course to share our experience testing mobile applications and platforms, and well, because lots of people asked us to. The course shows you how to test mobile platforms and installed applications for vulnerabilities. HBN Mobile provides a pretty complete and practical overview into the methods used when attacking mobile platforms and presents you with a methodology that can be applied across platforms (although we focus on iOS and Android). This course is mostly for existing penetration testers who are new to the mobile area looking to learn how to understand, analyse and audit applications on various mobile platforms.

For more information about the course, and to book a place, head over here.

Workshop: Malware Reverse Engineering

If we were marketing to hipsters, we’d use words like “bespoke” and “handcrafted” to describe this workshop. While it’s not made out of yams, it was put together especially for 44con.

Inaki and Siavosh’s workshop will cut through the black-magic often associated with reverse engineering and malware. Advanced attacks usually have some form of malware involved, and learning to pull these apart to understand the kill chain is an increasingly vital skill.

Using real malware used in attacks against large corporates, students will look at both behavioural analysis and code analysis, to determine what the malware does.

If you’re keen to attend, speak to the 44con crew at the front desk on arrival.

Talk: ‘Honey, I’m Home’ – Hacking Zwave Home Automation Systems

Behrang and Sahand will be presenting the results of their research into smart homes on day two at 09:30am.

“Smart homes” employing a variety of home automation systems are becoming increasingly common. Heating, ventilation, security and entertainment systems are centrally controlled with a mixture of wired and wireless networking. In 2011 the UK market for home automation products was estimated at GBP 65 million, an increase of 12% on the previous year, with the US market exceeding $3 billion. Zigbee and Z-Wave wireless protocols underpin most home automation systems. Z-Wave is growing in popularity as it does not conflict with existing 2.4GHz WiFi and Bluetooth systems.

Their talk describes the Z-Wave protocol and a number of weaknesses, including how to build a low-cost attack kit to perform packet capture and injection, along with potential attacks on the AES crypto implementation. Bottom line: they can walk up to a house, disable security sensors, then open the front door. LIKE A BOSS