Defcon and Ciscogate
We went out to Defcon last weekend too. Presentations were fantastic, people were great. Yes, Vegas was hot. No, I didn’t die. Yes, there are real hackers there. No, I can’t put you in touch with them. Besides a ton of amusing info, like spoofing a root DNS server while executing an intentially blunt attack for IDS to find you and start autoshunning the name system (teehehehehe) to information about physical locks like spool pins and what a dual ball locking padlock is and why you should care. There was a great presentation about penetration testing the backbone that mentioned the horrid horrid mistakes that Cisco is making. If you have anything to do with security and/or networking equipment I highly recommend paying attention to what Cisco is doing and never EVER doing anything of the sort. It’s stupid. I’m sure all those companies calling me looking for help creating Linux based backbone networking equiptment are just drooling over the huge hole that Cisco has left for them to drive through.