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Pwnie Awards 2013 Winners: Barnaby Jack, Edward Snowden, Hakin9, Evad3rs
hypnosec writes "Winners of the Pwnie Awards 2013 were announced at a special event during the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. The highlight of the awards were Edward Snowden, Hakin9 and Barnaby Jack. Barnaby Jack was given posthumous Pwnie award for 'lifetime achievement' while Edward Snowden and the NSA were jointly given the award of 'Epic 0wnage'. Hakin9 on the other hand was awarded 'Most Epic FAIL'. Best Privilege Escalation Bug award went to David Wang aka planetbeing and the Evad3rs team."
What happened with nmap they call it an epic fail?
Nmap didn't get the Pwnie for Most Epic FAIL. The Pwnie was awarded to Hackin9, which accepted and published an autogenerated article called "Nmap: The Internet Considered Harmful - DARPA Inference Cheking Kludge Scanning". Publishing bullshit without reading, questioning or understanding, now where have I seen that before? You fucking morons.
Hakin9 is a magazine that's not exactly too reputable.
It looks like someone took a paper "written" using SciGen and submitted it to them. Because they didn't read the paper at all, they didn't notice it was absolute bullshit courtesy of finest context-free grammars people could code.
Brilliant work - not only is SciGen great for busting less than reputable scientific publications that don't exactly value this "peer review" thing, but now it has busted security magazines too.
How is "pwnie" pronounced?
Does it sound like "pawny", like in "pawn shop"?
Does it sound like "peeny", like in "penis"?
Does it sound like "piny", like in "sewing pin"?
Does it sound like "pony", as in a small horse?
Does it sound like "puny", as in tiny in size?
Does it sound like "pyny", like in "python"?
Does it sound like "pweenie", like in "weiner"?
Quote:
"Edward Snowden's leak of NSA secrets was an epic example of the insider threat to information security, while his revalations convinced many that the entire Internet is thoroughly and epicly owned!"
Nicely put.
As for Nmaps Most Epic FAIL, anyone understand that?
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
I have been curious for awhile: does the term pwned, and Pwnie award, stem at all from the "OMG Pink Ponies" April first slashdot gag from a few years ago? The Pwnie awards does show a pink pony on their front page. Or does the term predate all that?
Really just curious, hope this isn't too off topic.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
It's in the link above provided by anonymous coward, but just focus on the acronym for the title for the paper: DARPA Inference Cheking Kludge Scanning And you'll see the double down joke played on Hackin9.
Comparing them to Slashdot "editors", who are truly Thalidomide babies of the mind.
Turns out they took the award from Hackin9 and gave it to Slashdot for their beautifully ironic quality of editing.
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
"Hacking9 Magazine" got Epic Fail award, for an article called: "Nmap: The Internet Considered Harmful - DARPA Inference Cheking Kludge Scanning"
It was a spoof paper, written to expose the CRAP editorial policy at Hacking9.
They were PWN3D by a whitepaper...
http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2012/q3/1050
"They clearly chose that title so just so they could refer to it as DICKS throughout the paper. There is even an ASCII penis in the "sample output" section, but apparently none of this raised any flags from Hakin9's "review board"."
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Slashdot is actually just summarizing the summary in "Parity News", which itself totally cocked up the 'epic fail' award.
Is this not the conference where they held a bake off to see which browsers and platforms withstood hacking attempts? I can't find any updates on their site about that.
Obviously, event-driven modalities
and web browsers are based entirely on the assumption that extreme programming and digital-to-analog converters are not in
conflict with the deployment of massive multiplayer online role-playing games.
Only some kind of random generator could come up with such a load of crap ...
They could have made Edward Snowden's award posthumous as well, as his old life is pretty much over.
Back in the days of netnews, store-and-forward email, private dialup BBSes, and a far lower proportion of script kiddies in cracker circles, there was concern that the government would be able to monitor (or already was monitoring) a larightrge amount of the Internet - netnews, mail, BBSes, etc., - and handle the volume by using keyword-searching software. (Snowden's recent revelations show their concerns were correct - through PERHAPS a bit early.) So some among the computer underground began obfuscating their text communications to try to stymie that approach to surveillance.
In addition to using slang (which, of course, would quickly be figured out), the approach was to distort the spelling of words in ways that (with a little effort) would be recognizable by a human eye but not by a straightforward word matcher. Misspellings (common, adjacent-key, adjacent-character substitution, etc.), homonyms, substitution of letters that looked similar, digits and punctuation for similar-looking letters (such as 3 for E, dyslexic style), building typewriter pictures of letters, etc. were typical. The idea was to pile distortion upon distortion until it was somewhat difficult to read, and constantly mutate the distortions, perhaps settling on a style but NOT on something that could be easily built into a pattern-matching.
Thus was born leet-speak (always, of course, spelled in its own form, such as "133t" or "I334".) Of course the constant-mutation was quickly lost in favor of more stable use of certain attractive forms, thus turning it into an ordinary slang and defeating the purpose.
At the time "owned" was already a slang term applied to systems which were cracked and controlled by a tacker, or the owner/operator of such systems. "pwned" falls right into the pattern on two rules: adjacent-key misspelling and "little p looks like little o" visual pattern matching. So I assumed, at the time, that it was just another instance of the form.
Now that does not say that it DIDN'T originate as an in-game typo that grew into an in-joke. But gaming and cracking circles have overlapped substantially since the breaking of early attempts at computer-game copy protection. So the two explanations are not in conflict:. A typo that fit right into the form would be immediately seized and used.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way