[King Tuna]’s Hacking EVDO was a popular talk. Things are really just starting on this front. Now that some of the newer cards have unlocked firmware (probably thanks to the need for sofware update EVDO revisions), It’s now possible to edit the firmware. With the door open, people can start mucking around with ESN’s and we’ll probably see some ESN duplication exploits soon.
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Defcon 15: WiCrawl From Midnight Research Labs
[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
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
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
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.
Hack-A-Day Meetup (T-Shirts!) On Sunday
Yes. Free T-shirts. Free stickers. At Defcon 15. (No virtual begging.) We’ll have skybox 206 on sunday, but we’re only planning to be set up around noon for an hour or so. Come get em.
The swag is free, but we’d like it if you’d toss us a buck or two to donate to the EFF.
The Defcon Badge
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.
