DEF CON 22 concluded last month, it was held in Las Vegas as usual from August 7 – 10. The annual hacker convention has evolved and become more “mainstream” or as the regulars say, “oversubscribed”. So now we have two hacker conventions happening side-by-side in Las Vegas. The other being “B SidesLV” (read as Besides- L-V) which was held before DEF CON on the 5th and 6th of August.
Tesla, the electric car company came down to DEF CON seeking the help of hackers towards making their Model S electric car more secure. Tesla’s vehicles are known to use a fair amount of wireless technology, one of the uses being to transmit firmware updates on the go and also remotely monitor vehicle statistics. All of this makes the car much more tempting for hackers to fiddle with. The company is looking towards hiring 20 – 30 hackers in order to find vulnerabilities with their system before they can push new features onto the vehicle. The dashboard for example, is powered by a Tegra 3 which is a common SoC used in smartphones and tablets that can easily run Android applications. This brings the daunting task of ensuring that hackers have no way into getting control over the vehicle through an application and this is why the dashboard is yet to see this feature.
Some of the brainiest hackers on the planet attend this event
John McAfee stole the show(s) when he chose to speak at both the hacker conventions. If you’ve watched any of his recent videos on YouTube then you’d know exactly what to expect. McAfee went on a long rant about government surveillance with a few backhanded comments aimed at major companies.
The rant evolved into him unveiling BrownList.com, a website where you can go and rant about companies that have wronged you. The motto for the service is “It’s payback time”. The website aims to bring these conflicts to a positive outcome by having the community vote on different courses of action.
The show floor had plenty of puzzles including the regular attendee badge and a T-shirt by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Blackphone, the Android based smartphone geared towards privacy and data security made its presence felt at DEF CON 22. The phone recently started shipping pre-orders on June 30th. This one is created by SGP technologies and is not to be confused with the Boeing Black, a similar Android based phone. PGP creator, Phil Zimmerman who has been following the project keenly was one of the speakers at DEF CON. His talk was more focused towards how the surveillance society was doomed given that security and encryption technologies are becoming more mainstream and gaining more popularity.
