Toorcon was a really a wonderful experience. I met lots of readers and other interesting people in a very social environment. It's really cheap and I would encourage you too attend next year. I've posted the few photos I have to Flickr. While you are over there you might as well join the Hack-A-Day photo pool. Quinn's photos are much better than mine; I didn't have to haul around a Canon EOS D30 … [Read more...]

UPDATE: Slides Dan Kaminsky was wondering most of the weekend what I would post about Toorcon. If there's one thing I learned it is this: Dan Kaminsky is nuts. The future projects and other theory that comes out of his mouth is awesome. I had a great time hanging out with him. His talk was similar to the one from this year's Blackhat (slides here). Dan started by discussing the breaking of … [Read more...]

UPDATE: Slides Major Malfunction's infrared hacking is considered a "must-see" talk. His interest in IR was piqued when he bought a new car and could no longer replay the IR remote code with his Palm III to unlock the doors. So he started investigating rolling code remotes and other IR based devices. Modern hotels usually have the room services system built into the tv. Maintenance and house … [Read more...]

UPDATE: Slides Sysmin & QuiGon of the Hacker Pimps presented their new FairuzaWRT firmware for the WRT54GS. They started with the OpenWRT firmware and added packages to make it useful as a penetration tester. Tools were added to mount NFS and Windows shares. Several exploits are included as well. The FairuzaUS shell script ties everything together by providing a simple frontend for changing … [Read more...]

UPDATE: Slides This was probably my favorite talk at the conference and I hadn't even planned on going till someone pointed out what bunnie's previous work was. There are a couple reasons why bunnie enjoys reverse engineering silicon: It is constrained by physics, silicon is hard enough to design before thinking about security, and the chips have to be reverse engineered during the production … [Read more...]

Apparently when Jason Spence isn't reading Hack-A-Day he is reading manufacturer data sheets. He's fun in real life; I swear. The talk started with an overview of motherboard architecture. By studying manufacturer data sheets you can figure out a pathway to attack the BIOS. A proof of concept BIOS backdoor has already been developed. This is a very scary situation since the OS isn't even loaded … [Read more...]