Security Hacks

1534 Articles

Tatjana Van Vark

August 13, 2009 by 49 Comments

scanplatfs1

Go to this site and you’ll be greeted by a crazy looking woman wielding a giant egg and a blunt object that looks like Jupiter with mischief in her eyes. This is Tatjana van Vark.  Her library of projects ranges from the mundane such as a couple of incandescent lamps, to a fully functional Antikythera mechanism. As you browse around at things like her one of a kind cipher based on the enigma machine and her inertial navigator platform shown above, you’ll find the quality of her work astounding. Randomly peppered haikus give us a brief glimpse into her mind as we look at, literally decades, of amazing work. We’re sure many of you are drooling at the thought of some build details, but you’ll have to work for it. Decipher the haiku on the coding machine’s page for the build details… if you can.

[thanks Verimius]

Malicious ATM Found At Defcon 17

August 4, 2009 by 49 Comments

atm

A fake ATM machine, set to capture ATM information was found at Defcon 17 in vegas this year.  Its design has a tinted plastic window at the top which attendees noticed had a computer in it. It was quickly removed by the police. Is this an amazing coincidence? We doubt it. Someone probably knew exactly who was going to be there and either wanted to scam some hackers or just wanted to have some fun.

Smartphone Anti-virus Software

August 1, 2009 by 37 Comments

cracked

With DEFCON and Black Hat going on, a lot of security issues are being made public. This year, cellphones have been a larger target than before. More and more people are carrying complex smartphones that have more ways to go wrong. Even worse, since phones are tied to a billed account, it is possible for malicious software to charge phones discreetly. However, Flexilis promises to keep your phone safe. It’s a free mobile anti-virus that works on most smartphones and PDAs with more clients in the works. It also provides easy backup and recovery options, as well as the ability to wipe the phone if it’s lost. The phone makers really need to fix the probelms, but in the meantime Flexilis can provide a quick response.

[via WSJ Digits]

Black Hat 2009: Parking Meter Hacking

July 30, 2009 by 53 Comments

For day two of Black Hat, we sat in on on [Joe Grand], [Jacob Appelbaum], and [Chris Tarnovsky]’s study of the electronic parking meter industry. They decided to study parking meters because they are available everywhere, but rarely considered from a security perspective.

Continue reading “Black Hat 2009: Parking Meter Hacking” →

Lazy Man’s USB RFID Reader

July 30, 2009 by 12 Comments

c_674_usbrfid5 (Custom)

[Don] had some Serial RFID readers that he needed to work and be powered by USB. He went out and purchased a simple serial to USB converter, but was left with the problem of the operating voltage. He supplies the schematics on his site for his solution. Basically he gutted the converter and integrated it all with the appropriate voltage broken out. The final project is nice, using the serial to USB convert as the project box and even including a nice LED to show when an RFID tag has been read.

Black Hat 2009: Breaking SSL With Null Characters

July 29, 2009 by 25 Comments

Update: The video of [Moxie]’s presentation is now online.

[Moxie Marlinspike] appeared on our radar back in February when he showed sslstrip at Black Hat DC. It was an amazing piece of software that could hijack and rewrite all SSL connections. The differences between a legitimate site and the hijacked ones were very hard to notice. He recently stumbled across something thing that makes the attack even more effective.

Continue reading “Black Hat 2009: Breaking SSL With Null Characters” →

Pwnie Award Nominees 2009

July 21, 2009 by 9 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pSsLnNJIa4]

The Pwnie Awards are an annual event at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. They award the Golden Pwnie in a variety of categories: mass 0wnage, most innovative research, most overhyped bug, most epic FAIL, and our favorite: Best Song. Embedded above is [Paco Hope]’s 50 Ways to Inject Your SQL. While a strong entry, it doesn’t touch last year’s winner Kaspersky & Me: “Packin’ The K!”.