Astronaut Or Astronot: Don’t Try To Record SQL Queries At DEFCON

It’s Friday morning and time for another round of Astronaut Or Astronot, the little lottery thing where we’re giving away lots of dev boards, programmers, and an awesome meter to someone on hackaday.io if they have voted in the latest round of voting.

There’s no video this week because, you know, DEFCON, but the person randomly chosen did not vote. Too bad.

This means the voting will continue next week, same time. If you want a chance to get your grubby mitts on a bunch of awesome gear, vote. Do it now.

view of front and back

Hands-On DEFCON 22 Badge

It took a measly 2-hours in line to score myself entry to DEFCON and this nifty badge. I spent the rest of the afternoon running into people, and I took in the RFIDler talk. But now I’m back in my room with a USB cord to see what might be done with this badge.

First the hardware; I need a magnifying glass but I’ll tell you what I can. Tere are huge images available after the break.

  • Parallax P8X32A-Q44
  • Crystal marked A050D4C
  • Looks like an EEPROM to the upper right of the processor? (412W8 K411)
  • Something interesting to the left. It’s a 4-pin package with a shiny black top that has a slightly smaller iridesent square to it. Light sensor?
  • Tiny dfn8 package next to that has numbers (3336 412)
  • Bottom left there is an FTDI chip (can’t read numbers)
  • The DEFCON letters are capacitive touch. They affect the four LEDs above the central letters.

I fired up minicom and played around with the settings. When I hit on 57600 8N1 I get “COME AND PLAY A GAME WITH ME”.

Not sure where I’m going from here. I don’t have a programmer with me so not sure how I can make a firmware dump. If you have suggestions please let me know in the comments!

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DEFCON Shenanigans: Hack The Hackaday Hat

We don’t want to call it a challenge because we fear the regulars at DEFCON can turn our piece of hardware into a smoking pile of slag, but we are planning to bring a bit of fun along with us. I’ll be wearing this classy headgear and I invite you to hack your way into the WiFi enabled Hackaday Hat.

I’ll be wearing the hat-of-many-scrolling-colors around all weekend for DEFCON 22, August 7-10th in Las Vegas. You may also find [Brian Benchoff] sporting the accessory at times. Either way, come up and say hello. We want to see any hardware you have to show us, and we’ll shower you with a bit of swag.

Don’t let it end there. Whip out your favorite pen-testing distro and hack into the hat’s access point. From there the router will serve up more information on how to hack into one of the shell accounts. Own an account and you can leave your alias for the scoreboard as well as push your own custom message to the hat’s 32×7 RGB LED marquee.

You can learn a bit more about the hat’s hardware on this project page. But as usual I’ve built this with a tight deadline and am still trying to populate all the details of the project.

Defcon Presenters Preview Hack That Takes Prius Out Of Driver’s Control

hacking-control-of-a-prius

This one’s a treasure trove of CAN bus hacks that will scare the crap out of an unsuspecting driver — or worse. [Charlie Miller] and [Chris Valasek] are getting ready to present their findings, which were underwritten by DARPA, at this year’s Defcon. They gave a Forbes reporter a turn in the driver’s seat in order to show off.

You’ve got to see the video on this one. We haven’t had this much fun looking at potentially deadly car hacking since Waterloo Labs decided to go surfing on an Olds. The hacks shown off start as seemingly innocent data tweaks, like misrepresenting your fuel level or displaying 199 mph on the speedometer while the car is standing still. But things start to get interesting when they take that speed readout from 199 down to zero instantly, which has the effect of telling the car you’ve been in a crash (don’t worry, the airbags don’t fire). Other devilish tricks include yanking the steering wheel to one side by issuing a command telling the car to park itself when driving down the road. Worst of all is the ability to disable the brakes while the vehicle is in motion. Oh the pedal still moves, but the brake calipers don’t respond.

The purpose of the work is to highlight areas where auto manufacturers need to tighten up security. It certainly gives us an idea of what we’ll see in the next Bond film.

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[Jason Scott] Throws Down A Preview Of His DEFCON Documentary

defcon-the-documentary

Let’s face it, we all love DEFCON. Even if you’ve never been there before, we think it would be a huge struggle to find a reader who hadn’t been enchanted by at least one of the many hacks and talks that come out of the conference every year. We’ll prove it to you in a second, but first let’s get to the business at hand. Internet historian and all around good-guy [Jason Scott] has set his documentarian skills on DEFCON and just published a nearly twenty minute preview of the film which will leave you with more questions than answers (that’s the point of a teaser, right?). He’s not new to this kind of work. We loved his film BBS: The Documentary and can’t wait to see what he’s managed to do when this is released in the new year.

Oh yeah… we were going to prove a point. Some things that came out of the yearly hacker conference which you probably drooled over after the fact include:

This is just a sliver of what this event offers. Should be fun to see all the stuff [Jason] got into that we never even knew about.

DEFCON 20 Tamper Evident Contest Signup

DEFCON 20 is on its way and if you want to put a team together to compete in the Tamper Evident competition now is the time! The idea of the contest is simple: your team needs to break into something without anyone every knowing. The payload is protected by the best of modern tamper evident techniques. One of the things we really like about the competition is that there are multiple levels so if it’s your first time you DO stand a chance. The number of teams accepted is limited, so don’t wait too long and miss your chance to register.

There’s a ton to be learned from the contest RULES. But perhaps a better primer is going to be [Datagram’s] fifty-two minute talk which we’ve embedded after the break. He was one of the winners of all four contest levels at DEFCON 19 last year.

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The Scariest Hacks From Black Hat And Defcon

Although [HAD] is generally all about legal hacking, this list of demonstrated hacks could be used for the dark side as well. Hopefully by demonstrating hacks like this, most people can be more aware of how they use their information. Computer security experts also have a chance to hone their skills and see where potential vulnerabilities lie.

Some of the highlights from this article include hacking a Siemens S7 PLC, which can be used for factory automation, a “hacker drone” that we’ve featured before, and a method to deduce someone’s social security number from personal photos on social networking sites.  Also scary is a method to shut down certain personal insulin pumps.  Although serious in itself, one would hope that other life preserving devices would be adequately protected against intrusion.

One hack that seems like it could have interesting uses in the legal-hacking world is the idea of VoIP botnet control. Although “botnet control” obviously implies illegal use, controlling a computer with voice or touchtones can and does have many legal uses.