Wired Reports On Korea's First Hacker Con

evanwired writes "Quinn Norton offers a great first-hand account of the first South Korean Hacker con. Marked by conservative dress and polite conversation, the group was nevertheless still very much concerned with the shortcomings of computer security." From the article: "A police crackdown three years ago left South Korea's hacking community broken and fragmented. One of the conference's more animated speakers, 'Xpl017Elz,' complained that many of Korea's best and brightest hackers wound up emigrating to more receptive environments with better pay for security researchers. But he also demonstrated a large and difficult divide between how the hacker communities behave in Korea and the United States. Xpl017Elz's presentation focused on four (of a reported seven) attacks he developed against Red Hat's Fedora Core using ExecShield. He demonstrated privilege escalation, where a logged-in user can become root and take over the machine, and remote code execution, wherein an external attacker can gain root without a login."

Comments

Re:Security researchers?

[tds67]

If I don't invite you to hack my network, you're nothing but a criminal, often a destructive one.

Yes, the constructive criminals are much more preferable.

Koreanet

[Anonymous Coward]

To me, and I am sure I am not alone, KoreaNet gets blocked at the firewall. They are easily the number 1 (well maybe comcast) originator of spam, exploits, hack attempts, port scans and ftp brute forces. I have nothing against the korean people, but you'd be shrooming to think that these "hackers" arent really spam bot operators with a front of a con. Its like florida - so much a hotbed of spam, that you might as well lump them all together and call the whole country/area dirty spammers.