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Famed ATM Hacker Barnaby Jack Dies Days Before Black Hat Conference
wiredmikey writes "A shocking and sad day today in the security industry. Well known hacker Barnaby Jack has passed away, sending a shock through the security community. Jack, a famed white hat hacker, was scheduled to present at the Black Hat conference on Tuesday, and present research on vulnerabilities in implantable medical devices. Shocked reactions hit the Twittersphere on Friday, as many in the industry conveyed their condolences, shock, and even disbelief, hoping new of the death was some sort of hoax. 'I just wake up and heard this, really sad, I can't believe this, no words,' Cesar Cerrudo, CTO, IOActive Labs, said in an email to SecurityWeek. Barnaby Jack is probably best known for his ATM hacking demonstrations, which he liked to refer as 'Jackpotting,' and performed at a few conferences, including a demonstration at Black Hat 2010 that got media attention around the world. The San Francisco Medical Examiner's office told Reuters that Jack had died in San Francisco on Thursday, but did not provide additional details."
. The San Francisco Medical Examiner's office told to Reuters that Jack had died in San Francisco on Thursday, but did not provide additional details."
Well, that is the official version of events, yes. -- NSA
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I'm shocked.
Sometimes people just die.
Sometimes people get killed.
Sometimes people get killed by agencies funded by (yet unaccountable to) the United States Federal Government.
Not saying that's what happened. Just saying...
A 50% chance of passing away prior to the start of the gathering and a 50% chance of passing away after the start of the gathering.
Medication might help.
We are all honey pots for entropy
That sucks.
He was an interesting character. He helped me sneak a girl into a hacker party at the Peppermill one year during Defcon. No one that drank with him, even once, will ever forget him.
God had better keep an eye on him. If the pearly gates have any exploits, he'll find them.
See that "Preview" button?
Sometimes simply detaining a person is not enough. It attracts too much attention. Gotta take it to the next level. Good luck trying to prove anything.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Who edits these posts? Learn to re-read it.... spell check does not always help....
"hoping new of the death"
how about NEWS of the death....
Or gangbanging...
It's not just the USA, ask David Kelly how he feels about his "dead under a bush" joke (*).
Kelly spilled the beans on the Blair Dossier being full of poor and unreliable WMD intellegence and should not be used as a basis of a war. He joked that he'd be found dead under a bush, which is where he was found shortly after. Suicide.
hmm, his pacemaker just started to go crazy for no apparent reason, I guess, he wasn't the only one that knew how to hack the pace maker. remote control death. This is strait out of sci fi.
I was willing to give you benefit of the doubt. Since I've seen something vaguely like this happening. Read the PDF seriously, until it got to the methods of electronic harassment. Then I stopped reading and will now take neither you or this website seriously. Why? Bullshit like "Voice to skull" and "Electronics that affect the mind through walls". Then it just completely went off the wall and listed "Mind control" seriously. Way to lose all credibility, because quite simply this looks like and probably is nothing more than conspiracy theory. The same type of people who think they're allergic to wireless routers.
This is an insult to the great late Barnaby Jack, and you can go to hell.
>If they are intelligent, the trolls always play WITHIN the written rules, attempting to infuriate others so THEY step outside the guidelines and get banned
Oh that sounds really clever.
Anybody knows what Jack died from?
You will be missed.
You know, I can't say I'm a big fan of the President but that drivel you spout is ridiculous in the extreme. The fantasy world you live in makes Hollywood movies seem realistic. I'd be willing to bet my life that President Obama never ordered anyone to cluster bomb a village filled with women and children. It is possible that the military targeted a site thought to be a terrorist camp and it was filled with women and children. Maybe, but I doubt even that happened. You see, women and children are targets for the terrorists that think making war on women and children is the way to go since they know they stand zero chance in a stand up fight with US Marines. They like to put up anti-aircraft batteries in school yards filled with children so that either no one will attack them to prevent killing the children or if someone does attack them fools like you will say that they targeted the children and school and forget to mention a couple of hundred terrorists and weaponry. I dislike almost everything the President does but he's the elected President of my Nation and I resent this bullshit slander by a lying idiot like you.
Two words - "collateral damage".
A month ago the idea that the US government was monitoring the entire internet, had access to every major ISPs records and could listen to anyone's phone calls at any time was a joke. Now look where we're at. I'm not saying we have to believe the wildest of conspiracy theories but at this point we have no baseline from which to compare. What the NSA is doing with their spying is so outrageous that I can no longer use common sense to judge if a conspiracy theory about their actions is more or less likely. Just because it defies common sense, just because it would cost billions, just because it would be technically infeasible, immoral, unconstitutional and would result it little or no benefit to the NSA, government or American people, no longer means they wont do it. If you would have asked me a month ago what was more likely, that the Government was doing what we now know the NSA is doing, or if the Government was executing reporters and security researchers it thought were a threat to national security, I'd have quickly said the latter.
Like I said, maybe. Collateral damage is not targeting someone. Collateral damage is what happens when a rocket launcher is shooting at you and you shoot back blowing up the launcher and, unfortunately, the people in the neighborhood where the launcher is located. For this reason people usually flee war zones but many times terrorists actually block people from leaving so they can up the likelihood of collateral damage.
Lebjoot here.
Sorry if I offended you, it was not my intention. Thanks for your time.
Lebjoot here. :)
Hehe, that was funny
You mad, bro?
I wonder how much his research would have cost device makers monetarily... Does anyone know if the research he was going to present is or will still be made publicly available?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Anybody knows what Jack died from?
Well, SOMEbody does. But they're not telling.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I'd be willing to bet my life that President Obama never ordered anyone to cluster bomb a village filled with women and children. It is possible that the military targeted a site thought to be a terrorist camp and it was filled with women and children.
Yeah, if your second sentence is true, then your first sentence is false.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
It's not "hacking" when the government just uses the access codes to your pacemaker that the manufacturer so thoughtfully gave to them.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Then I stopped reading and will now take neither you or this website seriously. Why? Bullshit like "Voice to skull" and "Electronics that affect the mind through walls". Then it just completely went off the wall and listed "Mind control" seriously.
Brief yourself on one Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado for the tip of the iceberg, public realm not-secret-at-all stuff. The will clearly exists. So does the money. And if you have the capacity to research beyond your comfort zones, you'll discover, so does the tech.
Yes, sorry, electromagnetic signals can absolutely be used to excite different parts of the brain, and have been for a long time.
And once you're done being titillated by that freak show, hold on to your hat because then it gets really upsetting.
The "Greenbaum Speech" is required reading for anybody who wants to claim maturity in terms of awareness. http://www.empty-memories.nl/science/greenbaum.pdf
And sorry, but you're still just on the tip of the iceberg, but you'll need all that cold to stay chill.
Don't worry, though. You're not alone. Awareness leads to its own stability. The nameless anxieties people experience daily without really knowing why decreases a lot when you can put labels on the monsters. Beasties are a great deal less frightening when they have post it notes on their horns.
That's a really self-serving definition of "collateral damage". You're a tool.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Based on misreported deaths -- e.g., John Denver's death by aircraft misreported a week before the actual event -- there is a small (let's be generous, call it 0.1% ) chance that he did not die as of the time of publication by Reuters.
Because of that, his chance of dying after the Black Hat conference is nowhere close to 50%. His chance of dying before the event was less than, but approaches, 100%.
We adjust statistics to reflect known facts and known probabilities. The reports of his death are a known fact. Whether he in fact died is not a known fact.
[For you researchers out there: this is just like the rules for combining data sets: if the number of data points in each set is not known, you use one set of rules. If the number of points is known, you use a set of rules similar to combination of areas and moments of inertia with the Parallel Axis theorem. Use the correct combination equations for the situation, please]
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Try this instead: http://www.reuters.com/search?blob=barnaby+jack
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Please source that joke. Yes, the death was suspicious, that's documented. But if the joke has a source, it belongs in wikipedia.
Actually, the joke was more like an ad on a college bulletin board:
"Did you know that the NSA is not only interested in spying, but also funds research in almost every field of university study? ... if you would like an application form for an NSA grant, call your mother and ask for one...."
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
But when I hear a man over 40 die suddenly its usually a heart attack, accident or suicide.
I follow the school of thought that I could be "hit by a bus" at any time. All my documents and code are in remote repositories ("commit" is my "save"), and I've arranged several ways for folks who need/want access to get it. A distributed replication strategy is dead simple -- git pull in a chron job does the trick for most of my stuff.
That way, I know anything I put in: ~/with/great/power/comes/great/responsibility/ will at least get seen by some people I trust.
For the casual deadman there's several online solutions, even Google has theirs.
In a way, we live in a continuous afterlife where the passed pass the patterns of genes and minds towards eternity via cultural contributions. It's up to the living to carry on in the spirit of our deceased. It's a waste of life's works otherwise.
Now I'll have my moment of routing output to /dev/null/ in observance of Barnaby Jack, hoping none of his contributions will do the same.
A month ago the idea that the US government was monitoring the entire internet, had access to every major ISPs records and could listen to anyone's phone calls at any time was a joke.
Was it? It seemed totally plausible to me.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
That's just the thing here. Banking controls the world right now. We think it is government, but it's pretty much banking and money. As the global financial crisis comes closer to "the end of things" it's getting more and more serious. Now that the people hacking, cracking and exploiting vulnerabilities in money systems and services are becoming heroes to the people, the government can no longer be trusted to handle these people through official means.
We're going to see a lot more assassinations and mysterious deaths than we have been seeing lately.
A better definition of collateral damage (that matches what the U.S. military and three letter agencies are actually doing) would be something like, "You're sitting in a trailer in Texas, watching a live feed from the UAV you're piloting over Pakistan, when you see a group of young men. Your supervisor tells you they're insurgents and you should kill them. You fire a missile at the group, entirely dismembering every one of them. They were standing next to a woman holding a baby who was walking by. She and the baby are splattered all over the ground." THAT'S collateral damage. Not just the woman in the baby, but between 0 and ALL of the group of young men identified as insurgents.
Not so. An order by the military is not an order from Obama. This may come as a shock, but the the military occasionally acts without Obama's direct knowledge. If the first sentence is true, then Obama said "Bomb this place." The second sentence can happen entirely without that scenario.
I think the point he is trying to make is that there was never an order to bomb a village when it was known that it was filled with women and children, or that the point of the bombing was to kill said women and children.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Your definition is also correct. There is no way to fight a war in an occupied city without killing civilians. In the parent's post however he made it sound as if those guys in that trailer were actually targeting the woman with the baby which is stupid. Even absent the wrongness of that it makes no sense even from a practical standpoint because it's a waste of resources to kill those that can't conceivably be a threat. The only way to avoid civilian deaths is to give up and leave. I can say that I think that may be a good idea but then eventually the area becomes a general threat again. Sometimes there is no good solution.
Ah! Someone who can read and comprehend. I actually think most deliberately misunderstand out of spite.
Why does TFA talk about proximity of the conference to the date of his death? Surely there are other things more notable about the man's life than this.
I kind of find it odd his passing, but what could it even mean. That someone hacked him perhaps. Will we ever even know.
I think the point he is trying to make is that there was never an order to bomb a village when it was known that it was filled with women and children, or that the point of the bombing was to kill said women and children.
The residents of Hamburg, Dresden, London, Coventry, Tokyo, Frampol, Wielu, Warsaw, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe might be inclined to disagree with you. All major powers have a history of doing precisely that (burning the shit out of civilian population centers). In your Grandpa's days, that was called demoralizing the enemys industrial base and winning the war. We just stopped doing it. Mostly.
Of course, more recent examples can be found in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the military now tries to take the civilian death toll into account before dropping Napalms replacement on population centers (we said we wouldn't do it anymore in the 80's, but reserved the right when incendiary bombs would cause fewer deaths in our estimation).
At some point, the US decided that our military could do things like peacekeeping. It's really a shame, because they are damn good at what they are designed to do (kill people), not so good at the whole "I'm now a beat cop in an area slightly less dangerous than W Chicago / Livernois Ave Detroit".
Just making sure we don't forget what we are.
Does anyone know if (by any chance) he had a pacemaker?
I will admit that I have not read all 104 previous comments, but yes, there ARE technologies, as mentioned, using electromagnetic fields to affect brain function, and possibly more. I was invited and participated in DARPA think tank research and conferences, and between the conference briefings, and inter-expert discussions, I was blown away by the disclosures of what is possible and has been used. Without going into too many details (ahem...."free" energy!...gesundheit...and other novel technologies) it stimulated me to delve into years of subsequent research into the record. I have bought god knows how many books, checked web sources, technical papers, patents, chased down people who have received national security letters to prevent their further public disclosure of their work, etc. (all mainly for my own edification and understanding), and just like other things with alternative medicine I researched, experimented on, and personally and professionally verified in a professional capacity as a relevantly qualified and practicing design and R&D engineer, I was beyond amazed at what exists and is generally well below the public radar or outright disregarded as so called conspiracy theory when in fact, it is provable, working, documented tech in more than enough cases, and has been credibly suppressed (for public and commercial development) at worst. I never had so many classified findings, even when I was an operational member of a special forces unit in my (misguided) youth. Now as to death and whether it is murder, I will admit I cannot comment on the current hacker. Dr. Eugene Mallove, who (as head of publications and a PhD physicist at MIT) resigned from MIT and disclosed the essentially deliberate fraud of MIT's report presuming to disprove Pons-Fleischmann's cold fusion work, then became involved in the free energy movement, was mysteriously beaten to death in front of his home by parties unknown shortly before he was scheduled to testify in front of Congress with a working model of a free energy device. Above unity researchers are regularly harassed and threatened in a multiplicity of ways, including death threats from official parties. Stanley Meyer claimed many, and in a celebratory dinner, with a NATO officer, having signed a large sum R&D contract for use of his hydrogen fracturer, he took a drink of his cranberry juice, almost immediately said his last words..."I have just been poisoned" and went out to the parking lot, collapsed, died. Official autopsy claims brain aneurism, with dispute by his surviving brother and other witnesses, but so it goes. Certainly "free energy" research seems to be an unusually dangerous profession, just like that reporter whose car just seemed to have exploded in LA. What I learned professionally as a member of a special forces unit, what I have intensely researched over the years has led me to credibly believe you are foolish to think there are those who will not kill to keep secrets and who will not kill to preserve immense cash flows from our varied petroleum, coal, and nuclear industries. We are expected to believe people readily and repeatedly kill over bar arguments and do murder for hire for a few hundred dollars in our inner cities, and tens of thousands in insurance policies, but it is "conspiracy nuts" to believe interest groups will kill when millions and billions in profits, or state secrets, political power, and dirty dealings might be uncovered? Let us be real. Human history shows clearly that people have been killed for less (by governments) than the hacker was going to reveal. I am not saying his death IS suspicious. Certainly natural causes are often at play, and modern life habits are killers. Bear in mind the declassified CIA operations manual talks about assassinations and that it is best if they can be made to appear as accident or natural cause and arouses less opposition and suspicion. that alone should be sufficient warning worth considering given the unparalleled death of reporters in the Iraq campaign, in circumstances that to
Not arguing here (we're all friends here), but look into some of the stories of the remote operators. One told about being ordered to target a dwelling, out of which ran what looked like a "very short person", just before the missile hit. That figure was completely obliterated. The operator asked his spotter for more information about it, and was told, "it was just a dog". It seems as though there's a callous disregard for innocents in these operations, even after you discount the helicopter pilots who joked about the insurgents they tore to shreds with the cannon (who turned out to be journalists).
There's more than a little wrong here.