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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."
OVER 9000!!!!
...is that they are always humping your legs as soon as you put them in promiscuous mode.
...showing Goons, hardware and sniffer dogs.
These guys must be extremely high-tech if their security dogs can sniff wireless!
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
seriously, what is so special about this ?
MP3 Search Engine
They've got... network cables! and, and, switches and stuff! There's even some fiber there! It's almost like they're trying to get a bunch of people on the Interweb... crazy.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
I only just got back from defcon 16, and already I missed 20?
If these guys wanted any kind of openness with security, these pictures would be on the DEFCON index page instead of some kinda "security through obscurity" nonsense where only just now are we seeing how they are running the network. If it gets hacked, that should be part of the conference -- how it was compromised, what to do to protect it better, etc.
stuff |
The dog is to make sure no one sneaks in drugs and gets the router high.
The Defcon network is bad if you are a sheep, but if you jsut treat it like you are going to visit China (with a return trip through US Customs), its not that bad...
New system, everything through an SSH tunnel, only your necessary working set, and temporary login credentials to throwaway accounts, and its all good!
Test your net with Netalyzr
The dog is to keep the techs away from the equipment for change control purposes.
It completely replaces IT management at a fraction of the cost.
Nullius in verba
please don't pee on the routers!! You will void Cisco's warranty.
From TFS:
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.
It's temporary. It's not going to have to be maintained for years on end, which is the point of textbook wiring jobs. Otherwise it's a waste of effort.
More Twoson than Cupertino
It's also probably set up for the conference, and taken down when it's over. Why would you bother neatly tying your cables and making everything proper lengths if you're going to just take it apart a week later? I'd be willing to bet most of their setup fits in that transit case under the firewall and switch.
"In case of emergency, break glass. Scream. Bleed to death."
Yes, their network setup looks.. uhmmm... temporary and built with something less than a multimillion dollar budget. So, how would you build a wireless network for '9000' hackers?
Pretend you have some assets already plus $10,000 to spend. How would you build the temporary network?
I've seen a lot of 'how they did it' infrastructure articles, and lots of smirking here, so how would YOU build that network?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
A bunch of world class hackers set up a wireless network.
What could possibly go wrong?
Try going to Europe. Last time I went to the CCC Congress in Berlin the uplink was 600 mbit. They usually put up signs on the second deay stating "use more bandwidth."
Usually crappy US show network. Go over to Europe where they know how to put on a show. Very few rules and even those are flexible.
Oh, and the number of machines stolen over the past 23 years can be counted on one hand.
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/652-slides_network_review.pdf
It's not the size of your stack that matters, it's how you push and pop
Are other colors of makeup safer for APs?
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
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...
Um...these volunteers set this up for free. Sure they could have spent serious $$$ on providing free wireless to a bunch of miscreants who are too cheap for mobile service and wired it up to look prettier. That's not the point. Unless you are volunteering to bring out your equipment, and setup and run this show, and do it just as securely and reliably, a simple THANK YOU will do. Otherwise, STHU. As wise old Ben said "Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do."
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.
"Over 9000" is a joke/meme, Timothy. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=over+9000 http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Over_9000
You start indices at 0, to avoid extra math. But you really should start counting at 1, at least you'd like anyone else to know what's going on.
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).
4) Profit!
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Did you actually read the page that you referenced? I mean all the way through?
PyCon 2008 used a 40Mb wireless connection @ 40Mbs, not a DS3. Dropping a DS3 in for a temp event is big bucks (try it sometime!)
Now read their utilization graph. If they had 20Mb, they'd have been perfectly fine (they only spiked above 20Mb a couple of times). So let's say you're paying the $15-20K to drop in a DS3 to a hotel. If you could pay significantly less with no realistic impact to service, wouldn't you?
How many corporate sponsors did PyCon have?
Now compare to the corporate sponsors for DefCon.
Now compare budgets.
Comparing SuperComputing's Network to DefCon? Seriously?
Convention networking isn't a dick-swinging contest--it's about getting it done.
It's part of the Aruba management software suite.