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First-Ever Photo Tour of Defcon's Network Center
Kugrian writes "With over 9,000 hackers, freaks, feds, and geeks attending Defcon 16, the temporary wireless network setup there is considered the most hostile on the planet. Run by a dedicated group of volunteers known as Goons, the basement Defcon Network Operations Center is secured by means of a chain-link fence and armed guard. The 20-megabit connection, which is twice as fast as Defcon 15, runs over a point-to-point wireless link to another hotel that has point-of-presence in their basement. Wired's Threat Level blog managed to secure the first ever photo tour of the Center showing Goons, hardware and sniffer dogs." Reader TXISDude, who was at Defcon, doubts that attendance was as high as 9,000. Update: 08/13 18:14 GMT by T : Dave Bullock, the Wired photographer who shot these pictures, backs up that figure, though: "I interviewed Joe Grand, the badge designer a few weeks before the con. They ordered 8,600 total badges. They ran out of badges. There were hundreds of people with paper badges."
TFA says that "...a quad-core Xeon running OpenBSD and employing pf to filter and shape traffic" is in place. I think it'd be excellent if they'd release the config for this so that we may all learn from it.
Release it after the con, that is, just in case there's a hole found in it...
I've never been to DefCon before, so I'm just curious... do people actually get in trouble for any of the things they do there? If you do a man in the middle attack, do people get mad? Or is it just assumed that anyone on this network is fair game and you can 0wn them as you see fit?
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
HASSEN IJOU DA!
(In the original Japanese audio, he actually says "It's over 8,000", which is funny because there are doubts the attendance was over 8,500).
Blah Blah Blah.
The first rule of cybersecurity is to have physical security. This is not security by obscurity, at all. The DEFCON network is not the focus of the DEFCON conference, so no, it should not be on the front page. Cracking the DEFCON network is not the (primary) focus of the DEFCON conference so no, there should be no need or competition to -- especially since crap like that usually results in packeting instead of actually interesting attacks. You also seem to assume that a post-mortem analysis of a break-in takes a few minutes, whipping up a presentation about it takes an hour or two, and conclusive results as to how to do it better are done in time for a presentation. Talks at DEFCON take a while to prepare.
(Now, if somebody had cracked the network with a new kind of attack they just happened to be speaking about at DEFCON, that would have been interesting :-)