DefCon 15 Session Videos and Audios Update

It has been six months since the world largest hacker conference is over. I am referring to DefCon 15 of course, which was held on August 3 - 5, 2007 at the Rivera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The educational sessions where video-taped, converted to .MOV format (Apple) and pressed on 10 DVD-ROMs, which were then sold for $299 at the conference and for $499 thereafter.

Video DVD-ROMS on Google Video
I bought (pre-ordered) the DVD-ROMs at the conference and received the DVDs sometime in September 2007. I uploaded all of them to Google Video. You can find the links to the videos in this article and the three additional articles it refers to.

People were asking me constantly for the videos for download rather than on a video sharing site. Some people reported that the download of the original video files (yeah, it’s a trick and not visible to the general user hehe) was also not working for all of the files for unknown reasons. Google must have screwed something up, that’s why is Google Video still in Beta, right?!

Video DVD-ROM ISOs
So I spent countless hours to rip the DVD-ROMs, create nice ISO files out of them, then RAR and split them and finally ZIP and upload to Usenet. Ages later (no, I don’t have FiOS) were all ISOs finally up on the Internet. See this post of mine from November with all the details needed to download the ISOs.

Well, maybe because of the fast availability of the videos or maybe because the folks at the DefCon organizers crew got a bit smarter, I don’t know, but it also does not matter…

Getting to the Point, finally
What I want to say is that they already, only 6 months after the event, did they make the videos and audios available for download on the DefCon.org website. They created two separate RSS feeds, one for the videos and one for the audios. They posted it last Wednesday already, but I didn’t see it until today.

DefCon 15 Videos Feed (MP4)
DefCon 15 Audios Feed (MP3)

The videos are in .MP4 format and not .MOV, but those two formats are basically the same, with the only difference that Microsoft Media Player prefers MP4 over MOV (to say it nicely).

The two RSS feeds contain 122 videos and 122 audios in all. Here is once more the session listing in PDF format.

So, there you have it folks, watch the stuff online, download the whole ISOs or individual video recordings in MP4 or MP3 format, whatever pleases you.

122 + 3 = 125 - 122 = 3 ... WTF?
There is only one question left for me. Their feeds contain 122 items each. That was also the total I got when I posted the first videos to Google Video. I said it myself in my blog post about it.

I came to 125 videos and corrected my previous statement that there are only 122 when I was done with uploading and made my last post with links to the individual remaining sessions. See the post here.

Now there are 122 videos in the official DefCon.org RSS feed. I don’t get it and I won’t start counting again. I leave this mystery for somebody else to solve.
If you check out my posts to the videos from last year, have a good look at them, because I provided also some other useful goodies beyond the DefCon 15 video and audio recordings.

Enjoy
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Delivery of My DefCon Videos ISO Promise

Finally, the 10 synchronized DVD-ROM ISOs with all the 125 video and audio recordings of the DefCon 15 educational sessions and panels (price point $499) are now up on the internet.

You can find the ten ISOs on Usenet, but I hope that they will find their way into torrent search engines and FTP servers around the internet

Below are links to the .NZB files to retrieve the Usenet posts and .SFV (simple file verification) files that include the CRC32 checksums to verify the integrity of the files.

The ISO’s are distributed as RAR archives in 50 MB size chunks and the zipped with NFO file and FILE_ID.DIZ.

NZB Files: ISO01 - ISO02 - ISO03 - ISO04 - ISO05 - ISO06 - ISO07 - ISO08 - ISO09 - ISO10

SFV Files: ISO01 - ISO02 - ISO03 - ISO04 - ISO05 - ISO06 - ISO07 - ISO08 - ISO09 - ISO10

... or download all 20 NZB and SFV files as ZIP archive.

I already apologized for this late delivery, but I explained the reasons for the delay in a previous blog post.

I put up the audio files one week ago at MediaFire. I just tried to access the files and they are gone, so is my account and other files, like the SACtro videos. Attempting to create a new account returns a vague error message. I contacted support to find out what the heck is going on. The audio files are still available at my backup location at SendSpace (where I pay money for it, so appreciate it).

Just as a reminder, all videos from the DefCon 15 hacker conference, held in August this year at the Riviera hotel and casino are already available for a few months at Google Video. See my blog post from early September that contains a listing of all the DefCon 15 presentation videos.

So, I consider now my promise to be fulfilled. It took a bit longer that you and I expected, but better late than never, right? The guys who flaked out on me maybe will also deliver what they promised eventually, beyond the partial fulfillment that at least one of the guys was able to provide.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Quick Update 11/17/2007: MediaFire is up and okay again. Files (DefCon 15 audio recordings among others) were not lost and are accessible again via this URL.

DefCon 15 Video DVD-ROM ISOs and Audios Update

I mentioned in my first post to the DefCon 15 video uploads to Google Video that I are looking into getting the DVD-ROM ISOs up on the Internet and that I was looking for a better location for the audio recordings of the sessions.

So far did I only had partial success with all that. I sent the ISOs once as physical copy and also once via FTP to two different people who promised to make them available online.

One of the two people didn't do anything yet as far as I can tell and the other one fulfilled his promise only to 60% by only putting 6 of the 10 disks in ISO format online. Here is the link to the six DefCon 15 Video DVD-Rom ISOs. It's a start, but I am not very happy with the development so far.

I had more luck with finding a better location for the audio files, 123 of them and a total of 1.3 GB in size. I made the DefCon 15 Audios available for download at Mediafire.com, which allows me to share the files there for free. Sendspace charged me for that and everybody who downloaded from there can thank me for paying the bill for them.

I apologize to everybody who hoped for more than that, but it is all I can deliver at the moment. It wasn't all just up to me and I wanted to share at least this partical success with everybody who is still waiting for it.

I hope to be able to provide some final good news eventually. I am still working on it and did not give up on the idea yet. Keep in hanging there.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Custom ASCII Art Prints

While I was at DefCon in Las Vegas did I check out a vendor who did custom t-shirts. This stuff is often very cheaply done and the t-shirts don't last very long. Three times washing it and the print would fade out. What caught my interest was the fact that they actually did very professional and high quality print and that for a reasonable price.

I always wanted to have some nice ASCII or ANSI printed on a shirt so I showed them a few ASCIIs and asked them, if they could do it. I am not an expert in this kind of stuff, but it turned out that block ASCII was actually very hard for them to do, because they convert the image to vector graphics first and use that pattern when they do the actual print. They said that the creation of that vector pattern will take forever, because it has to break down all the individual lines. And there are a lot of lines in Block ASCII hehe.

I agreed for the higher price tag, if I can get in return the vector file, which will allow me to do additional copies fairly easy without spending a lot of money. They agreed and said that it will take a while and that it will be impossible to do it right there at the conference and be done the same day. No problem, the conference was still on for another two days so I agreed to give them time until the last day of the show.

The Results
... were pretty amazing. I had them make me two t-shirts, one with a SAC ASCII logo by Hetero and another one with my own Dytec ASCII logo. Here are two photos showing me wearing the t-shirts. The Dytec logo color is a gray, like the original font color in MS DOS. The SAC logo is in bright and shiny white.

Below each photo is a link to the original ASCII art piece on my website for comparison.


See original ASCII


See original ASCII
Pretty cool eh? I was thinking about creating some more t-shirts and may be sell them off my site, but I don't know if there is any interest in that kind of stuff. If you are interested, leave a comment here at my blog to let me know. If enough people are interested, I will consider it. If you can't wait and would like to get the same t-shirts, which I am wearing in those pictures, read the next paragraph.

A Little Gift
I was thinking about it and said to myself "what the heck!". Here are the vectorized versions of the two ASCIIs, which were used for the prints and were the most time consuming and expensive part of the whole process. I zipped them up and the file is about 2 MB in size. The file format is ".ai" whatever that might be, but the shop I used for the prints is able to use them and print additional t-shirts very easily and cheap, because they can load it right into their printing machine without any pre-processing.

ASCII-VectorImages-Print.zip

You can thank me for it by linking to RoySAC.com, making a donation (see any of my arts detail pages) or buying some of my mouse pads or something like that. I nice thank you and a drink (if we ever get a chance to meet in person) will also do I guess hehe.

Where Can You Get Something Like This?
The shop that did the t-shirts also does other types of custom prints. I was asked a few times where you could get ANSI art as a poster or large picture to hang it on to your wall. Here is the answer to that question: custom print. It is not cheap, but it also does not cost an arm and a leg. You also have to worry about a frame. You might want to ask them if they would take care of the framing for you. Keep in mind that a framed picture is harder to ship and would increase the cost for that.

I can recommend the print shop that did the t-shirts for me, it is called LBGFX Solutions. You can visit their website at LBGFX.com. They are located in National City in California. You can also contact the owner directly via email. His name is Liz Dela Cruz and his email is lizdcruz at gmail dot com. Tell them that I recommended him. He will not remember my name, just tell him "the guy with the ASCII prints at DefCon 15" and he will remember :).

Another print shop I know who does this kind of print and also understands what you are talking about if you ask for an "ANSI" to get printed are the guys from ShadowVex for whom I created the custom DefCon ANSI. They are located in Oregon and their website is more or less under construction and promotes their DJ'ing and not their custom printing. They organized the sound and music for one of the official DefCon parties btw. and they do sell t-shirts and a lot of other custom printed merchandizing for DefCon at the conference for over 10 years now. I talked with them about the need of a website and maybe some ecommerce features while I was in Vegas. It is on their to-do list. In the meantime is the best way to contact them via email. The name of the guy is Kevin Whitesmith and his email is Kevin at shadowvex dot com. Say "Hi" from me, if you decide to email him.

Cheaper Alternatives
For simpler prints do you not have to get fancy. I used deviantART for some stuff, like my ASCII and ANSI mouse pads and postcards. I blogged about them last November in greater detail.

Click on the image to enlarge.

Buy ANSI Print	Buy ASCII Print

Another alternative for this kind of stuff would also be CafePress. They also do t-shirts, but be careful and keep in mind that the quality of those t-shirts is probably not getting even close to the quality print done by a professional custom print shop.

Good luck and happy printing :). Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Definitions of the Terms Hacker, Cracker and Coder

It was several months ago that I noticed the discussion at Jason Scotts blog about the definitions for hacker and cracker. I would add to that mix the term coder, because it will become important in the details of own definition of each of those terms.

Three important facts will I mention right from the start:

1. There are hundreds of definitions for the term hacker out there and they are all different ranging from portraying a hacker as an ethical and selfless whiz kid who does things for the greater good to the evil and selfish wannabe who cannot create stuff himself and thus prefers to destroy other people’s work.
2. The meaning of the word hacker did change over time. People used the word in much broader terms in the past and even outside of computers.
3. Mass media put their mark on the term and helped to add to the confusion and misconception.

I recommend avoiding the use of the words whenever possible, because everybody perceives and understands it different. Especially if you are using the words in a positive context are misunderstandings just waiting there to happen. Instead of cracker, use "computer-crack" or in instead of hack, use the term ”exploit” or “workaround” instead for example. However, if you have to or want o use the terms, clarify what you mean by them and not just let the terms out there on their own.

My definitions incorporate the changes in the computer industry and the fact that it is not the world of single mainframe computers at individual universities anymore. Computers became a commodity and a large number of users are normal people today, who are not geeks and often not have very much practical understanding of the matter at the same time.

My Definitions

A "hacker" is for me a person who is an "advanced power user" and not necessarily somebody who is a programmer. A person who analyses software, tests it, automates requests via tools to scan a broad range of possible options in a short time-period. A person who wants to gain access and or control over another system by exploiting known security flaws, using brute force (scanning, dictionary attacks etc.) or human weaknesses and flaws (why use parents the first name of one of their child's as password so often?). He maybe finds technical security holes by accident, but is not the one who can seek them out as well. The hacker was spending time to find out the new frequencies for ATT, MCI or SPRINT to break their lines, scanned for valid calling card numbers, attempts to find new working credit card numbers by creating similar siblings from an existing credit card that works etc.


A "cracker" is for me somebody who "eats code raw", a person who is comfortable using software debugger, mostly doing debugging at the Assembler level. A cracker enjoys dissecting other people's code and "fixes" little inconveniences and "flaws" in software, like skipping license key input screens to speed up the software installation process. Crackers are not necessarily great programmers themselves, but have a deep understanding of technology and computer software.


A "coder" is somebody with remarkable programming skills. A coder is this type of person who spends countless hours on something of little or no practical value (just by itself), just because he wants to figure it out. Things like writing a program that listens to IO operations of a hardware component and displays it on the screen, which looks like your TV screen, if you did not select a TV channel, showing nothing but seemingly random noise.

Each One Could be One, Two or all Three of Them at the same Time

A hacker could be a cracker and coder as well, but often are the three different types of characters found in three distinct and different persons. They can excel by working together in conjunction with each other and as part of a group.

I reduced my definitions to what kind of skills each of them has and less on what exactly each skill is being used for. That each of the people is often living in its own little world is probably true. The world they live in is not always the same world normal people perceive as reality.

Hypothetical Collaboration between a Hacker, Cracker and Coder

If you ask how the collaboration between a hacker, cracker and coder would look like, here is how I see it. The hacker would be the person who is in charge and coordinates the efforts. He is the one who has clear goals and ideas in his head. He would be the one, for example, who thinks up how a tool would have to work to do something very specific. The coder could write that tool for the hacker.

A port scanner for example (just to keep it simple) could be such a tool. The hacker needs a cracker, if the hacker encounters specific software and cannot get around it by using brute force or guessing. He would try to get a copy and have the cracker take a look at it to find flaws or have him create an altered version, the hacker could try to sneak in as replacement for the original.

By Default Neither Good nor Bad

Here is a positive example to avoid the misconception that it is all about breaking into something and stealing data etc. What they do and what they do it for are two distinct and very different things and independent of the definition.

The coder writes a piece of software. The hacker tests the software thoroughly and approaches it from all kinds of different angles. He does in essence the quality assurance. The cracker is the one who is looking under "the hood" and checks the software for deep build in flaws and errors.

Quality Assurance

In the example of a piece of security software would the coder write the interface to enter the password, the encryption routines etc.

The cracker checks the code to make sure that the encryption is strong enough and that nothing is being exposed that reduces the effectiveness of the protection, like loading the key pairs in plain text into the memory for processing and stuff like that.

The hacker checks more like things such as minimum keyword length, supported characters and flaws in the interface.

The best encryption is worthless if the password can only be a set of numbers and the password is three digits long = only 1000 possible combinations which can be tried out in no time, via a script or even manually.

The best protection software is also useless, if you can simply press ALT-F4 and close it and then be able to move on and do what you want to do anyway. The hacker is the one who would look for this kind of stuff.

Conclusion

That is my take on this whole thing and I am convinced that most people would be comfortable with it, if they think about it for a moment, including hackers, crackers and coders themselves.

What are your thoughts on this subject? Feel free to comment below.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

DefCon 15 Session and Panel Videos - Batch IV - Final Batch

Yeah, I've done it! All videos from all DefCon 15 presentations/sessions and panels are now up on Google Video to watch for free.

All 4 batches combined are a total of 125 videos that are sold on 10 synchronized DVD-Roms in Quicktime format (.MOV) for $499.00 (okay, I paid "only" $299.00).

Here is Full DefCon 15 Session Listing in PDF format. It's sorted by tracks and presentation numbers and is easier to print out. The PDF is about 1.7 MB in size. See the resources further down below for the download of all presentations and extras of DefCon 15.

The Session Videos - Batch IV (Final)

Use the links in this blog post and the three previous posts to access the videos directly or perform a search on Google Video.

Use as search term "DefCon 15" in combination with the presentation number, e.g. "T539" for the "Internet Wars 2007" Panel (see this example link and query for "DefCon 15" T539).

Previous Batches

1. DefCon 15 Videos Batch 1 (47 Videos), selected videos from all 5 tracks
2. DefCon 15 Videos Batch 2 (17 Videos), remaining videos from track 1
3. DefCon 15 Videos Batch 3 (36 Videos), remaining videos from track 2 and track 3

Here is now the fourth and final batch with the remaining 25 videos for the last two presentation tracks.

Remaining Session and Panel Videos of DefCon 15 Track 4

1. T403 Picking up the Zero Day; An Everyones Guide to Unexpected Disclosures by Dead Addict
2. T405 Bridging the Gap Between Technology and the Law by John Benson
3. T406 Protecting Your IT Infrastructure From Legal Attacks - Subpoenas, Warrants and Transitive Trust by Alexander Muentz
4. T407 Digital Rights Worldwide: Or How to Build a Global Hacker Conspiracy by Danny O’Brien
5. T408 A Journalist’s Perspective on Security Research by Peter Berghammer
6. T409 Teaching Hacking at College by Sam Bowne
7. T410 Faster PwninG Assured: New adventures with FPGAs by David Hulton
8. T411 Ask the EFF (Panel Discussion)
9. T434 Technical Changes Since You Last Heard About Tor by Nick Mathewson
10. T436 Tor and Blocking - Resistance by Roger Dingledine
11. T439 Securing the Tor Network by Mike Perry
12. T442 Real-time Steganography with RTP by |)ruid

Remaining Session and Panel Videos of DefCon 15 Track 5

1. T501 Vulnerabilities and The Information Assurance Directorate by Tony Sager
2. T502 Meet The VCs (Panel Discussion)
3. T507 The Hacker Society Around the (Corporate) World by Luiz Eduardo
4. T508 Creating and Managing Your Security Career by Mike Murray & Lee Kushner
5. T509 kNAC! by Ofir Arkin
6. T531 Hack Your Brain with Video Games by Ne0nRa1n & Joe Grant
7. T532 How to be a WiFi Ninja by Pilgrim
8. T534 The Science of Social Engineering: NLP, Hypnosis and the Science of Persuasion by Mike Murray & Anton Chuvakin
9. T535 Black Ops 2007: Design Reviewing The Web by Dan Kaminsky
10. T538 Stealing Identity Management Systems by Plet

More Resources

1. DefCon Media Archive - 8+ GB videos, mp3 audio, PDFs, PowerPoints and tools from previous DefCon's, primarily from DefCon 13 (2005)
2. DefCon CD-ROM ISOs - Somebody put up the DefCon CD-ROMs of the last five conferences up for download. The CDs are in ISO format. Included: DefCon 11, DefCon 12, DefCon 13, DefCon 14 and the latest one from this August, DefCon 15.
3. DefCon 15 Session Audios - Only temporarely available at that location. 1.32 GB and 123 files. Its on my SendSpace account and will expire in a week or two. I have about 16 GB in bandwidth available.
   A new place for the audios is already being organized, also another location for the videos to download them in their original .MOV format.
4. Buy the DefCon Synchronized DVD-ROMs - 10 DVD-Roms for the "bargain" price of only $499.00 from "the Source of Knowledge" website. Yeah, right. I rambled about it in my post for DefCon 15 Videos Batch III already.

Okay, enjoy the videos!

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

DefCon 15 Session Videos - Batch III - Uno Mas

This time did I had again a few issues with Google Video. Three videos were uploaded and shown as successful in Google Video's desktop uploader tool, but are nowhere to be found on the Google Video website. Did I mention that the upload speed is damn slow too?

The Session Videos - Batch III

This is the 2nd largest batch of all four batches. It contains 36 videos. The first one had 47, the second one only 17 and the last one will only have 25 as well. 47 + 17 + 36 + 25 = 125. Oops, I miscounted the number of sessions in my first post. I thought it would be 122 videos only. Well, the more the merrier. :)

I just finished the download of the content from the DefCon website. They have the sessions of DefCon 13 (2005) up for the most part, in video and audio format plus the presentations and extras. All in all about 8 GB of data :). If their numbering system means anything, then there seem to be a few presentations missing for unknown reason. Also no sign of any video or audio recording from DefCon 14 last year.

Btw. If you want to buy the DVD-ROMs rather than watch them online, go to this website and get them for the bargain price of $499.00. (I got them for the super-bargain price of only $299)... I know what you are thinking... WTF?

Rambling
Right, the price of the recordings is ridicules high. Wasn't the mission of DefCon to raise awareness about security issues and holes in systems that admins and users can take steps against it?

Most security guys in the world are not able to make it to DefCon.
Video is a great medium to communicate a number of issues to people who were unable to attend and listen to the stuff in person. I bet that a lot of those guys also don't get the expenses paid for spending $300 or $500 on a set of educational DVD-ROMs.

DefCon should make them available for free on the Net and the DVD-Roms for a price that covers the manufacturing and delivery cost. It would be great PR and advertising for the show. DefCon could use a service provider that allows to require registration to access the free videos to build n email list to send conference updates to and some very targeted and limited advertising.

To pay for the video production by a professional 3rd party service, raise the DefCon admission fee by $5-$10. There would be a good argument for the raise of the fee. Attendees will be able to watch sessions they visited and also the ones they skipped in favor for another for free from the office or home. $5-$10 extra does not sound an awful lot for what people would get in return for it.

Outsourcing the production of the videos is fine, but the selling and distribution of them by a 3rs party is not. Something to think about.

Remaining Sessions for DefCon 15 (2007) Track 2

1. T203 Z-Phone by Phillip Zimmermann
2. T204 OpenBSD Remote Exploit and Another IPv6 Vulnerabilities by Alfredo Ortega
3. T205 MQ Jumping by Martyn Ruks
4. T208 Revolutionizing the Field of Grey-box Attack Surface Testing with Evolutionary Fuzzing by Jared DeMott, Dr. Richard Enbody & Dr. Bill Punch
5. T209 How Smart is Intelligent Fuzzing - or - How Stupid is Dumb Fuzzing? by Charlie Miller
6. T210 INTERSTATE: A Stateful Protocol Fuzzer for SIP by Ian G. Harris
7. T211 One Token to Rule Them All by Luke Jennings
8. T231 Multiplatform Malware Within the .NET-Framework by Paul Ziegler
9. T233 44 Lines About 22 Things That Keep Me Up at Night by Agent X
10. T236 Virtualization: Enough Holes to Work Vegas by D.J.Capelis
11. T237 Homeless Vikings, (Short-Lived bgp Prefix Hijacking and the Spamwars) by Dave Josephsen
12. T241 Greetz from Room 101 by Kenneth Geers
13. T242 Estonia and Information Warfare by Gadi Evron
14. T261 The Completion Backward Principle by geoffrey
15. T262 Boomstick Fu: The Fundamentals of Physical Security at its Most Basic Level by Deviant Ollam, Noid, Thorn, Jur1st
16. T263 Locksport: An Emerging Subculture by Schuyler Towne
17. T264 Satellite Imagery Analysis by Greg Conti
18. T265 High Insecurity: Locks, Lies, and Liability by Marc Weber Tobias & Matt Fiddler

Remaining Sessions for DefCon 15 (2007) Track 2

1. T302 Aliens Cloned My Sheep by Major Malfunction
2. T303 Breaking Forensics Software by Chris Palmer & Alex Stamos
3. T305 Cool Stuff Learned from Competing in the DC3 Digital Forensic Challenge by David C. Smith
4. T306 Windows Vista Log Forensics by Rich Murphey
5. T308 CiscoGate by The Dark Tangent
6. T311 Hack Your Car for Boost and Power!by Aaron Higbee
7. T331 A Crazy Toaster: Can Home Devices Turn Against Us? by Dror Shalev
8. T332 IPv6 is Bad for Your Privacy by Janne Lindqvist
9. T333 Injecting RDS-TMC Traffic Information Signals a.k.a. How to freak out your Satellite Navigation by Andrea Barisani
10. T335 Unraveling SCADA Protocols: Using Sulley Fuzzer by Ganesh Devarajan
11. T336 Hacking the Extensible Firmware Interface by John Heasman
12. T339 Kernel Wars by Joel Eriksson, Karl Janmar, Claes Nyberg, Christer Öberg
13. T340 (un)Smashing the Stack: Overflows, Counter-Measures, and the Real World by Shawn Moyer
14. T341 Remedial Heap Overflows: dlmalloc styl by atlas
15. T342 Thinking Outside the Console (box) by Squidly1
16. T364 LAN Protocol Attacks Part 1 - Arp Reloaded by Jesse D’Aguanno
17. T365 Entropy-Based Data Organization Tricks for Log and Packet Capture Browsing by Sergey Bratus
18. T366 Securing Linux Applications With AppArmor by Crispin Cowan

- 1st batch of session videos
- 2nd batch of session videos

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

DefCon Session Videos - Batch II

Sorry for the delayed 2nd batch of DefCon 15 session and panel videos, but Google Video had issues this week. The up-loader was not working at all for a while and then followed huge delays because of their random tests of content to make sure that it does not violate their policies jadajadajada.

The Session Videos - Batch II

This batch contains the remaining videos of track 1. I will continue to work on track 2,3,4 and 5 and hope that Google will not have as much issues anymore that I can publish the videos faster.

To demonstrate to you how sorry I am about the delay, here three goodies to change your mood.

1. Def Con Media Archive. The media archive has hundreds of megabytes of content (PDF's, Tools, Code, PowerPoint Slides, MP3 and MP4 movies) from the past 15 Def Cons available for download
2. DefCon CD-ROMS for Def Con 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15. I mentioned it in the comments of my post for batch one, but I am sure that a lot of people missed it
3. Def Con 15 sessions Audio - All audio recordings of the Def Con 15 sessions. They are only up for a limited time, because I put them on SendSpace.com and the storage time there is limited. I am looking for a permanent place for them to store on the net and will let you know when I found one. Until then, use this opportunity and download them now (about 900MB)

Okay, now to the main event, the promised Def Con 15 Videos, part II.

1. T101 - Making of the DEFCON 15 Badges by Joe Grand
2. T102 - Q&A with Bruce by Bruce Schneier


3. T103 - Turn-Key Pen Test Labs by Thomas Wilhelm
4. T104 - How I Learned to Stop Fuzzing and Find More Bugs by Jacob west
5. T105 - Convert Debugging - Circumventing Software Armoring Techniques by Danny Quist & Valsmith
6. T106 - Functional Fuzzing with Funk by Benjamin Kurtz
7. T108 - Intelligent Debugging for vuln-dev by Damien Gomez
8. T110 - Comparing Application Security Tools by Edward Lee
9. T133 - Pen-testing Wi-Fi by Aaron Peterson


10. T134 - Hacking EVDO by King Tuna


11. T135 - Multipot - A More Potent Variant of Evil Twin by K.N.Gopinath
12. T136 - The Next Wireless Frontier - TV White Spaces by Doug Mohney
13. T138 - GeoLocation of Wireless Access Points and "Wireless GeoCaching" by Ricky Hill
14. T139 - Being in the Know... Listening to and Understanding Modern Radio Systems by Brett Neilson
15. T141 - Hardware Hacking for Software Geeks by nosequitor & Ab3nd
16. T142 - The Church of WiFi Presents: Hacking Iraq by Michael Schearer
17. T165 - Intranet Invasion With Anti-DNS Pinning by David Byrne

Don't forget:
DefCon 15 session videos Batch I

Enjoy!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

All DefCon 15 Session and Panel Videos - Batch 1

I know that somebody will be pissed and mad at me right now, but who gives a fuck :). Here is the first batch of videos of 47 sessions and panels (of a total of 122), from the world largest hacker conference, DefCon 15, which was held on August 3 - 5, 2007 at the Rivera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

All videos together is a set of 10 DVD-ROMs!!! full of movie files. Bear with me while I am working on getting the rest of the videos up on-line. It's a pain in the ass and a lot of tedious work.

The Session Videos - Batch I

The videos are sold commercially for several hundred dollars, but who has that amount of money flying around, right? Okay, I paid the money. So you are welcome.

And anyway, isn't DefCon not about making exploits and scams public? I make them public, alright? Not the way some might have planned, but that is not my problem. I did not get the "Black Hat" sessions and have now second thoughts about it. They cost much less if you ordered it on-site. Damn, I hope somebody else will put them up on the Internet.

Okay, the first batch includes the following sessions, which are IMO the most interesting ones.

1. T536 - The Edge of Forever - Making Computer History by Jason Scott from TextFiles.com who also did the documentary BBS - The Documentary, which is also available on-line at Google Video.
2. T539 - Internet Wars 2007 (Panel Discussion)
3. T503 - Anti Spyware Coalition (Panel Discussion)
4. T504 - Disclosure Panel (Panel Discussion)
5. T505 - Dirty Secrets of the Security Industry by Bruce Potter
6. T506 - Self Publishing in the Underground by Myles Long, Rob "Flack" O'Hara and Christian "RaD Man" Wirth, founder and leader of the artscene group "ACiD" who did in 2004 a presentation called The Art of Textmode, the history of ASCII art, which is also available at my videos section.
7. T107 - Tactical Exploitation by H.D.Moore & Valsmith
8. T166 - Biting the Hand that Feeds You - Storing and Serving Malicious Content From Well Known Web Servers by Billy Rios & Nathan McFeters
9. T109 - Fingerprinting and Cracking Java Obfuscated Code by Subere
10. T111 - Meet the Feds (Panel Discussion)
11. T112 - No-Tech Hacking by Johnny Long
12. T131 - The SOA/XML Threat Model and New XML/SOA/Web 2.0 Attacks & Threats by Steve Orrin
13. T137 - Creating Unreliable Systems - Attacking the Systems that Attack You by Sysmin & Marklar
14. T140 - The Emperor Has No Cloak - Web Cloaking Exposed by Vivek Ramachandran
15. T161 - HoneyJax (aka Web Security Monitoring and Intelligence 2.0) by Dan Hubbard
16. T162 - Hacking Social Lives: MySpace.com by Rick Deacon
17. T163 - The Inherent Insecurity of Widgets and Gadgets by Aviv Raff & Iftach Ian Amit
18. T164 - Greater Than 1 - Defeating "Strong" Authentication in Web Applications (for Online Banking) by Brendan O'Connor. I blogged about that session and put the slides from the presentation up on-line.
19. T207 - It's All About the Timing by Haroon Meer & Marco Slaviero
20. T201 - Church Of WiFi's Wireless Extravaganza by Church of WiFi's
21. T202 - SQL Injection and Out-of-Band Channeling by Patrik Karlsson
22. T206 - Virtual World, Real Hacking by Greg Hoglund
23. T212 - Trojans - A Reality Check by Toralv Dirro & Dirk Kollberg
24. T232 - Malware Secrets by Valsmith & Delchi
25. T234 - Click Fraud Detection with Practical Memetrics by Broward Horne
26. T235 - Fighting Malware on your Own by Vitaliy Kamlyuk
27. T238 - Webserver Botnets by Gadi Evron
28. T239 - The Commercial Malware Industry by Peter Gutmann
29. T240 - CaffeineMonkey - Automated Collection, Detection and Analysis of Malicious JavaScript by Daniel Peck & Ben Feinstein
30. T301 - Analysing Intrusions & Intruders by Sean Bodmer
31. T304 - Re-Animating Drives and Advanced Data Recovery by Scott Moulton
32. T307 - When Tapes Go Missing by Robert Stoudt
33. T309 - Hacking UFOlogy - Thirty Years in the Wilderness of Mirrors by Richard Thieme
34. T312 - The Executable Image Exploit by Michael Schrenk
35. T337 - Hacking your Access Control Reader by Zac Franken
36. T338 - Security by Politics - Why it Will Never Work by Lukas Grunwald
37. T361 - Hacking the EULA - Reverse Benchmarking Web Application Security Scanners by Tom Stracener & Marce Luck
38. T362 - Network Mathematics - Why is it a Small World? by Oskar Sandberg
39. T363 - Beyond Vulnerability Scanning - Extrusion and Exploitability Scanning by Matt Richard
40. T401 - Disclosure and Intellectual Property Law - Case Studies by Jennifer Granick
41. T402 - Computer and Internet Security Law - A Year in Review 2006-2007 by Robert Clark
42. T404 - Everything you ever wanted to know about Police Procedure in 50 minutes by Steve Dunker
43. T431 - The Market for Malware by Thomas Holt
44. T433 - Routing in the Dark - Pitch Black by Nathan Evans & Christian Grothoff
45. T435 - Social Attacks on Anonymity Networks by Nick Mathewson
46. T438 - Saving the Internet With Hate by Zed Shaw
47. T441- Portable Privacy by Steve Topletz

I was writing about one particular session already twice here at my blog, here and the second time here.

It's the session with Brendan O'Connor titled "Greater than 1: Defeating "Strong" Authentication in Web Applications". If you did not believe me, watch it with your own eyes and hear it with your own ears.

Here is the video of that session. There is unfortunately no video recording of the discussion that happened afterwards in a different room, but I think that the session will be enough to open some people's eyes.



Got it? Gee....

Update: Get the DefCon 15 Session Videos Batch II remaining sessions from track one.

Update II: Get the DefCon 15 Session Videos Batch III remaining sessions from track two and three and ...
DefCon 15 Session Videos Batch IV (final batch) remaining sessions from track four and five.



Enjoy the videos! Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Why Worry Today, If Your Bank Account Gets Hacked Tomorrow

My post from a week ago, about the major flaws in the new online banking security systems that banks around the country deployed recently, did not get any attention. The flaw was explained in detail and demonstrated (by actually hacking a bank account) at the Defcon 15 hacker conference in Las Vegas. One person dugg it at Digg.com and that was it. End of story, nobody seems to be interested. Well, it only affects pretty much everybody, at least everybody who uses online banking.

Meanwhile did also other blogs that are specialized in application and system security write about the story. DarkReading.com was one of the most known publications who published the story "New Bank Practices Make Hacking Easier" a couple days after I published mine.

Their story died at Digg.com, just as mine, but at least did some more bloggers pick up their story. Here are a few other bloggers who picked it up:

• M. M. Madan: Bank's "Two Factor" Schemes Are Fundamentally Flawed


• AuthenticationWorld.Com: Why more authentication may be harmful to banks


• FIRST.org: New Bank Practices Make Hacking Easier


• Dr. Neal Krawetz/Hackerfactor.com: Black Hat and Defcon Post-Conference (as part of a general DefCon 15 summary

Here is a picture of Brendan O'Connor, who presented the issue at the conference, which makes it easy to understand, why some people might not give him the attention he deserves.

It is funny how things work sometimes. On the one hand are people going berserk and crazy about some "big privacy issues" that are bullshit. I just mention Google and the other search engines regarding their updates to their privacy policies.

I guess it has to hurt a bunch of people first, some accounts hacked and life's and businesses ruined that people wake up and ask "WTF is going on here?". The cries will be loud and painful to listen to. People will ask "Did nobody knew about this?" .. Of course did somebody knew about this, but you were not listen, you dumba...!

"Schadenfreude" is not a good thing in this matter, but a bit cynicism does not hurt either.

Quick Update: Here is the 47 pages presentation by Brendan O'Connor from DefCon 15 in PDF format (only 230KB in size), titled "Greater Than One - Defeating 'strong' authentication in web applications". dc-15-oconnor.pdf

The presentation document goes into much more details than I was in my previous blog post. It also illustrates the issues nicely. Check it out.

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

New Online Banking Security Process Opens More Security Holes Than it Closes

I just got back from DefCon 15 at the Rivera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. I will post about the other events at another time, because what I saw this late afternoon at the conference is more important. It is ironic that this session was one of the last one, when many guys already left the conference and were on their way home.

I saw at the conference, where a guy who is (maybe) legal drinking age showed a room full of hundreds of people (it became surprisingly crowded while his presentation progressed) “how cool” the new security add-ons to the online banking login and authentication process are. Additions that are enforced by governmental regulations with the intention to make online banking more secure.

The session was going well beyond the "time limit" for it (1 1/2 hours instead of 50 minutes) and the organizers shut it down eventually and the whole thing moved into a overcrowded Q&A room where the discussion and presentation was continued by the speaker for another 45 minutes, which was pretty cool of him, but you could tell, that he wanted to get this info out there.

Yes, the session was about online banking, the new and "more secure" online banking.

You might noticed that pretty much every bank changed their authentication forms and procedures over the last few months. Those changes, caused by the new government regulations are basically aiding hackers to break into your online account.

• Did you notice steps like picking "your" personal image (from a number of choices provided by the bank), that the bank will show you in the future as a proof to you, that it is really us, your bank, and not a hacker doing a phishing attempt to get to your personal information"?


• Did you see the security questions that are derived from your public records, very similar as if you try to access your credit report? Questions like, "Which of the following X things are true?" and then showing you things like previously owned car makes or home loan amounts, where one of them is matching yours?

Yes, those are the new security measurements that were ADDED to the existing online banking software, actually boiler plated in front of the existing software, almost in all cases provided by a different 3rd party vendor, because it was cheaper to add that kind of "patch" to the process to meet government regulations than it would have been to add it to the existing banking software itself, fully integrated.

What struck me the most is how bad it actually is. The new "enhancements" did not enhance the security of the old processes at all. They have the same flaws, but worse, they increased the attack surface for a malicious hacker and made it in fact easier for him to get the information he wants and even more as a bonus.

If I spent a few days with it, I would probably able to hack my bank myself. Its that bad and I am not a hacker (I am a geek and know a lot of stuff, but that does not make me a hacker and/or security expert for something like Online Banking).

I am sure that over the coming weeks and months stuff will surface in the news. People complaining or incidents about hacked accounts. Too much people saw this, not the detailed instructions how to break into the online banking software via a step by step guide, but he showed the way the updated systems work, or better, not work.

He would have broken the law and go to jail, if he would have hacked somebody else's bank account in front of hundreds of witnesses. He hacked his own bank account instead and provided proof that he is not doing anything extremely hard or attacked the system in a way to alter its behaviour.

By the way, the guys name is "Brendan O'Connor" and he works for an unnamed US finance company. He is not an unknown. He did break at last years DefCon the news about a security hole in Xerox printers, which caused quite some stir.

This time is the issue a much bigger and affecting much more people.
I will throw in some keywords and phrases that point to the problems. If you know a bit about computers, the internet and web development, you will get a pretty good idea what I am talking about.

• New Security is ADD-ON on top of existing authentication layer


• Finger Printing based on HTTP header content via client side Javascript (tip: "View Source", don't waste the time and write something yourself. Make it easier for you. If your bank uses Flash instead, download the flash and decompile it)


• Security question will reappear if remained unanswered. Answers will change every time the question is asked (randomly). No limit how often the same question is being asked (until answered)


• Personal image system. Same system used by majority of banks. Don't waste time on the images. Look at the alt tags. If you have an account, (don't) look at the nice image gallery where you can pick YOUR picture from. Look at the page where the image is shown to you. Ignore the image file name, that changes all the time and is not predictable, but look at the.. you know what to look at.


• Be grateful for non-obscure error messages, sometimes is the time the system spends on thinking about how to tell you that you entered the wrong stuff the actual message.


• If you write your own pages, don't forget to use the code you already got. Put a reference to the source in it and don't take the credits for yourself. Somebody spent a lot of time to write that code (for you) :)

Okay, that is enough. I hope you get the picture. I forgot to write the email of Brendan down. It was name.name@gmail.com. The "O'" part of his last name makes me unsure, if it was brendan.oconnor AT gmail DOT com or something different. You can find out through the DefCon.org organizers. Brendan said that he provides the code and everything to anybody who wants to see it.

One thing is for sure. That story does not make me sleep better at night, especially if you consider the fact that you are with almost 100% certainty not covered, if your account gets hacked and have to cover the losses yourself, opposite to the archaic method of using checks, where losses are covered by the bank, even if you lost your check book due to grave negligence. This is messed up!

Quick Update: Here is the 47 pages presentation by Brendan O'Connor from DefCon 15 in PDF format
(only 230KB in size), titled "Greater Than One - Defeating 'strong' authentication in web applications".
dc-15-oconnor.pdf

And also see the video recording of the DefCon Session with Brendan O'Connor:



Backup link to the video T164 - Greater Than 1 - Defeating "Strong" Authentication in Web Applications at Google Video if you have problems with playing the embedded video.

Major Site Expansion and New SAC Section with Art Packs Page

I spent quite some time to update content at my RoySAC.com Website. I wrote a whole ASCII art primer article to give you an idea what I am talking about in general. It is for people who do know little or nothing about ASCII/ANSI art, the artscene and the warez scene it operated in.

The biggest addition is the new SAC section, which is dedicated solely to everything related to Superior Art Creations, the art group, which I founded in 1994.

You can find there SAC VGA logos created by SAC members for the group, as well as ANSI logos and ASCII logos, which were created for internal purposes of the group.

The largest addition overall was the new SAC art packs releases page. It shows all 34 SAC art packs, which were released betweeen December 1994 and December 2005, the packs File_ID.diz, download links to the pack files, links to the SAC.NFO files for detailed information about each pack and a brief description for every release.

The descriptions are more detailed than I had originally planned. Because of that, does the page act as SAC history page for now, until a better SAC history page is being created one day. There are some "holes" in it, but I hope to get the missing information and will then update the page accordingly.

I updated pretty much every page of the site, including the home page, the Roy/SAC art page, the shop, the downloads section, the links page and the gallery pages (ASCII Art, ANSI Art, Best Of and VGA Art). The Website navigation was overhauled and has now a much slicker look than before. Here is a partial screen shot of how the navigation of the site looks today.



I hope you will enjoy the "renovated" and massive expanded RoySAC.com site. Let me know what you think about it, negative feedback is as welcome as possitive.

Thank you and Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Coming Up: DefCon, 15 Las Vegas

I will be at this years DefCon conference in Las Vegas, between August 3rd and 5th, 2007. DefCon is the world's largest underground hacking convention! This will be the 15th installment of the conference.

There will be over 175! Speakers and tons of sessions over multiple tracks.

My friend Christian Wirth aka "RaD Man", founder of ACiD Productions will be a speaker at the panel "Self-Publishing and the Computer Underground", together with Myles Long Director of Depravity, cDc communications/CULT OF THE DEAD COW and Rob "Flack" O'Hara member cDc's Ninja Strike Force.

Have you ever considered publishing your own book? Your own DVD? Self-publishing has been a part of the computer underground since its inception, from the Neon Knights to the Syndicate of London's recent book "End of Dayz". This panel will discuss types of self-publishing (both on- and off-line) and their relevance to the computer underground. They will also discuss their personal experiences in self-publishing. Ample time for questions will be available. Learn about the process from people who have gone through it.

Jason Scott from Textfiles.com and "BBS - The Documentary", who is a DefCon veteran, will be speaking at DefCon again too. This years session is titled "THE EDGE OF FOREVER - MAKING COMPUTER HISTORY"

Too often, "Computer History" gets shoved into a forgotten bin of irrelevancy, devoid of use for lessons and understanding. Even more often, people often fail to realize they're making history themselves. Jason Scott will walk though the basics of computer history, what to save, how to ensure things last for future generations, or perhaps how to ensure it's never found again.

I hope that I will be able to meet Jason in person. I read his blog titled "ASCII" and he seems to be a nice but also crazy guy (just like me hehe).

I got a free press pass for the conference, allthough the fee for a pass is cheap compared to other conferences, which I ususally attend. It's only $100. The hotel and flight are more expensive.

The event happens at the Riviera Hotel and Casino. The rooms are booked out. I am staying at the nearby but cheap Circus Circus, Resort and Casino.

There will be a sale of a limited editon DefCon T-shirt. I am telling you this, because I created the design for it :). It was my first ANSI in over 10 months.



Do you like it?

See ya in Las Vegas! Cheers! Carsten aka Roy/SAC