Security Ripcord

Another DefCon has been completed and, as I suspected, it lived up to its expectation.  I was able to catch up with a bunch of my blogging friends, meet a few new ones, and even have lunch with a few old co-workers.  As usual, the majority of my experience was dominated by The Mystery Box Challenge (MBC) in which I and my team got completely p0wn3d by LosTBoy, which was completely expected.

The weekend started out with ominous undertones as my primary computer (which I was not about to bring to DefCon) suddenly had boot errors.  Of course it didn’t turn out to be a problem such as a bad hard drive as I expected, it was merely GRUB trying to include a removable storage device and erroring out.  This “problem in plain sight” would prove to be the overall trend in the MBC.  I’ll go into the MBC in a following post as I want to provide a few tools to help people understand the solutions.

My first evening in Las Vegas started out like last year.  I met up with Jon Squire and we caught up with his past year and his turbo talk at this years Black Hat.  Although it did have some laptop issues apparently it went very well and was well received by those who attended.  He is doing some scary things with UPnP and vendors should start doing as he suggests by disabling UPnP by default and putting up a BIG RED WARNING label to try and keep them from enabling it.  This won’t help everything but at least it would be a start.

After a few beers with Jon I linked up with Chris Hoff, Alan Shimel (still down as of this typing), Mitchell Ashley, Jennifer Jabbusch, and a few others.  It was good to see Alan and Mitchell again.  I have always liked Alan because he is always helpful, generally happy, and very personable.  It was a same to see that he was subject of a “blog compromise” and I hope all goes well for him.  It was my first opportunity to meet Chris and Jennifer.  Chris and I have had a few conversations so it was good to hook up with him face-to-face.  I don’t think that Jennifer had heard of me before (I guess I have been in the weeds a little too much lately) but we had a good time getting introduced.  The first night ended with a long walk to the Microsoft party where I was promptly denied access since I did not have a pass.  This resulted in a long walk back to the Riv.  No big deal as it was already late in Texas where my body and mind thought we were.

The next three days were just a flurry of activity.  It started off with all of the DefCon Badges getting stuck in US customs.  Apparently they were being shipped disassembled and even when Kingpin got them out of quarantine they still had to be assembled.  After that the MBC started and I was basically consumed until the noon of the last day.  This meant that I couldn’t have dinner, lunch, and even drinks with many of my friends.  To all of you who tried to pull me away, thank you for trying, we’ll definitely get together some time this year.  I did, however, get a chance to met up with my friends Monty McDougal and Jesse.  We had a good time catching up and I even managed to wrangle an interview out of Monty.

That is pretty much the extent of my experience with DefCon.  I’ll have a better write up on MBC and my interview with Monty about his project Windows Forensic Toolchest™ (WFT) in the next few days.

Go forth and do good things,

Don C. Weber

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