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Reporters At Black Hat Get Bounced For Hacking
rickb928 and several others have written to inform us that three reporters for the French publication "Global Security Magazine" were booted out of the Black Hat convention for uncovering the login information of other reporters. Quoting the AP:
"The separate, wired Internet connections set up for reporters are supposed to be off-limits to hacking and the Wall of Sheep. Even so reporters who didn't take the extra step and log onto the Internet through an additional secure connection like a virtual private network, risked having their data exposed to colleagues sitting just feet away. It didn't appear to be a complicated hack. The network was working properly, but it wasn't set up to shield each journalist's computer from one another."
Really, I'm not surprised at all that people were kicked out of The Black Hat "Hacker" Conference for hacking.
Just shows that Corporate sponsored Hacker conferences are a contradiction in terms
Did these journalist not understand what their role was at this event? The Wi-Fi connections were free targets and that was understood. The hard-wired connections were off limits to all involved and only for the press, as I understand it. What were they thinking?
nobody plays Uplink enough these days.
Even so reporters who didn't take the extra step and log onto the Internet through an additional secure connection like a virtual private network, risked having their data exposed to colleagues sitting just feet away.
Even so people who post stories to Slashdot, should learn to use commas.
One Usenix there was an announcement that everyone who had used Kerberos to log in from the terminal room needed to set up new keys. Another finished with a paper on what someone had sniffed on the Wifi LAN.
So it's no bloody surprise it's happened at Black Hat. Not that the guys who did it were justified, and they're lucky they were just booted out, but anyone who doesn't use encrypted VPNs or encrypted tunnels at ANY technical conference is asking for trouble.
... hack like Romans hack!
Seriously, these reporters, they were told where they were going and what they were reporting on, right?
are really only switched between different speed segments. I.e., they might bridge (switch) between a 10 mb segment and a 100 mb segment, but they're only repeaters (hubs) on each.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Are they using a hub for wired connections at a security conference? Seems like the most plausible explanation for a simple "hack" like this with the network "working correctly"...
It's a common misconception that switches prevent snooping. Switches are *not* security devices, they are an performance optimization. As such, they mostly "fail open".
If you flood the switch with many different MAC addresses, such that its internal ethernet routing table fills up, it will usually simply direct *all* traffic to your port, rather than potentially incorrectly dropping some traffic you should have received.
And then you can snoop to your heart's content, with nobody else the wiser.
I wonder what lucky guy is overpaying you for network administration.
wrong:
http://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-usa-08/wallofsheep.html
... are seated in a noisy restaurant, yelling back and forth to each other from one side of the table to the other. I'm sitting 3 tables away and can hear them.
Am I hacking??
You're right it takes more work than setting up a dhcp server and plugging in a switch. No wonder they didn't do it.
Isn't about time /. just not allow anonymous first posts?
~ Ron Fitzgerald
That the wired lan was not secure.
The reporters that allowed their login/passwords
to be sniffed should be the ones exposed on the Wall of Sheep.
Talk about being led into a false sense of security.
They *knew* the Wireless was not secure.
But to *ASSUME* the wired LAN was to be trusted
clearly shows their ignorance of security.
The reporter that exposed the problem should not
be booted from future conferences, he should be
welcomed back!
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Computer misuse is illegal, yes, but not under the DMCA.
where at one point all of a sudden some guy a few rows in front of me shouts out "I was blind but now I can see!" on of those moments only a coder can truely appreciate I guess :)
Just start reading at the second post and do not reply to fist posts, not that hard.. Also The frosty pist at the top of the page tells you your are really on /. and that your DNS has not been hacked and redirected you to some fake ./ site.