[ news_security_news ]
Hackers Head To DefCon In Vegas
John Stith
Staff Writer
2005-08-02
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
The bright light city set hackers' souls on fire as they descended on Vegas for their annual DefCon convention. The convention brings together top notch hackers and their government adversaries to talk about the stakes in the electronic world and those stakes are getting up higher.
The conference discussed a number of issues including ATM machine security, picking up radio tag frequency, bustin' biometric security and even showed the professionals attending the conference were a little lackadaisical in the own security measures.
Some speakers at the conference went on to slam the Internet as a place loaded with crime and criminal behavior or as the AP quoted cryptographer Phil Zimmerman as saying, a "crime ridden slum." One of the biggest reasons was lazy users and then proceeded to show how.
They swiped passwords of a number of people attending the conference, posting the information on a screen and called it the "Wall of Sheep". These experts losing their passwords included a Cisco engineer, Apple employees and a Harvard professors according to the AP story.
The members of the federal law enforcement community, including the FBI, the NSA, the DOD and the Treasury Dept. all sent people to participate and even said they would be interested in hiring those who didn't break the law.
Experts said that bank machines were the up and coming target of choice for hackers to make money and also that radio tag frequencies used by the federal government for a variety of things are accessible by the right hackers.
The biometrics notion was perhaps the most unnerving in many ways. Biometric security includes the "foolproof" methods like fingerprints and iris scans and voice patterns. Considering many places utilize fingerprint scans in some form just to cash a check, being able to easily manipulate that could present some serious problems, even for grocery stores. One individual attending the conference called only Zamboni told the AP it would be fairly easy to bypass biometics by attacking their back-end system networks. He said "attack it like you would Microsoft or Linux."
All these issues show the direction of electronic security and where it's going. It also points out that one competent hacker can create a whole host of problems on a pretty large scale, let alone a network of them working to do something some might see as fairly complex.
Another line from the song says "A fortune won and lost on ev'ry deal; all you need's a strong heart and a nerve of steel." Well, as banks and private users and even the federal government work to contain the problem, it keeps getting bigger and it's not a matter of "when" the get control of it, it's more an "if" question.
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
More news_security_news Articles
Insider Reports RSS Feed
|
|
iEntry 10th Anniversary
RSS
Archive
