Defcon 15: WiCrawl From Midnight Research Labs

August 4, 2007 by 2 Comments


[Aaron] gave the latest on WiCrawl. The focus has been on the UI and usefulness for penetration testing. It’s got support for [David]s coWPAtty FPGA WPA cracking accelerator and some UI improvements. Even better, you can grab the WiCrawl module to put on a BackTrack Slax livecd from the project page. [Aaron] passed out some CD’s at the talk – I’ll update if the ISO gets posted.

And yes, I think I finally recovered from playing Hacker Jeopardy on team MRL. We held our own, but lost on the (LAME) final jeopardy question.

Defcon 15: Undercover Reporter Flees

August 3, 2007 by 33 Comments


I’m guessing this was pretty widely reported, but an NBC undercover reporter fled after being outed in the opening session. NBC Dateline associate producer Michelle Madigan refused press credentials on four separate occasions, choosing instead to pose as a normal attendee in order to covertly film other attendees. Defcon has a long running tradition of playing”spot the fed”, where attendees out people they think are federal agents. The feds play along and it’s all good fun. This was entirely different though: the game “spot the undercover reporter” was announced and she fled immediately, only to be filmed “To catch a predator” style.

I may just be a blogger, but I’m wearing my press pass proudly.

Defcon 15: Robot Challenge

August 3, 2007 by 2 Comments


Hack-A-Day reader [Colin] brought this machine to the robot challenge. He’s by himself, but managed to get this thing through airport security and it fit inside a single suitcase. He used a serial controlled eight channel servo controller, a usb-serial adapter and a hub to bring the wires together. Power is supplied by a pc supply and the system controlled by his laptop. The challenge was pretty popular and the teams were busy, so I’m light on the details. The gun just behind was servo operated, and performed pretty well in the tests I saw.

Defcon 15: Beer Cooling

August 3, 2007 by 6 Comments


When I checked it out, only two teams had appeared for the cooling contest. The method of choice? Rubbing alcohol and dry ice. The dry ice cools the alcohol, but doesn’t freeze it. [Team Hebrew] was my favorite – they used a vinyl hose to carry the beer into the cooling liquid. They managed a 45 second run at one point, and used a simple electric blower to evacuate the beer from the cooling line. They found that it was a bit easier to just blow it out the old fashioned way.

Mod Chip Crackdown In The US.

August 3, 2007 by 36 Comments

I got quite a few emails about this, but didn’t have a chance to check it out until now. It seems that the feds have been raiding various mod shops and individuals who’ve been doing mods for others. I’m a fan of open, moddable and repairable hardware, so this is sad news to me. There’s a first hand account from one of the raided individuals along with a decent commentary on the issue sent in by [xantium].
This might sound a bit strange, but take the time to let your congress critter know what you think about this issue. Don’t expect them to understand the technical background, but letting them know that you’re unhappy with the execution of the DMCA and that labeling legitimate uses for mod-chip technology as illegal is the equivalent to outlawing home car repair might make a difference.

The Defcon Badge

August 2, 2007 by 23 Comments


I made it over to pre-registration earlier and scored my badge. It’s a pretty interesting piece of work by [kingpin]. It’s got 95 SMD leds forming a matrix display. The top and bottom icons on the badge are touch sensitive buttons. It’s got selectable modes, programmable text scrolling, a pre-set POV mode and adjustable scrolling speed.

Update: I started digging through the CD they’re handing out at registration and found the schematics, BOM, layout, everything. I’ll have it posted as soon as it finishes uploading over my evdo connection. The board has provisions for wireless, 3 axis accelerometer, serial interface and it’s using a Freescale QF16 processor. (I tried looking up the chip number earlier, but utterly failed)

Update 2: I’m putting interesting defcon files up here. All the badge info I have is online. I noticed a confidentiality notice on one of the files, I’m assuming that it’s ok to distribute since they’re distributing this freely on the conference CD. If I hear otherwise, I’ll have to pull it.