Hacker Help Available...

I've just spent a solid week in Las Vegas surrounded by some of the most innovative, thoughtful, dedicated, rowdy, and entertaining people in the world - hackers. Specifically, I was in Vegas for the trifecta of security conferences; Black Hat, BSides, and DefCon. This is the annual convergence of hackers and security professionals from around the world in Las Vegas for a full week of sharing, learning, and fun.

DefCon 2017 Badges, Stickers, and Guide

These conferences are also arguably one of the most important components used by today's information security teams all over the world to keep abreast of new vulnerabilities, prevention techniques, and establish strong relationships with others regardless of political affiliation, corporate restrictions, hair color, income, class, gender bias, or age. They foster learning with several villages, workshops, lectures, labs, and sessions designed to show any and all who are interested to learn about anything imaginable. Securing Smart TVs? There's a session for that. How to talk your way (social engineering) into a Video Game company? There's a contest waiting for you to join in. Lockpicking? DefCon and BSides have areas dedicated to teach anyone in minutes! The world we live in is full of marginally effective security requirements, practices, and policies. These conferences exist to help make those practices better, improve policies, and show what works in the real world and what doesn't.

A phenomenal article just posted to the NY Times by Kevin Roose that sums up the core purpose of these conferences - to exchange information and develop ideas surrounding information security in a (reasonably contained) environment that encourages that discovery. Kevin visited DefCon's Voting Machine Hacking Village - a new village this year - that provided real, used, voting machines for hackers to experiment with. This was eye opening for all involved. *ALL* of the machines were breached before the conference was over - most on the first day. Hackers are smart people. There's no better place to test the security of a device than at DefCon. The reason this Voting Machine Village exists is to help identify those vulnerabilities in coding, hardening, and process to make them better. These hackers are here to help!

This same level of productive analysis of systems, tools, and software can be found everywhere in Vegas for these three conferences. Over the next few weeks, we're sure to see hundreds of new announcements of vulnerabilities found and fixes being provided for them. Let's hope the various manufacturers and especially the Voting Registrars are listening to the advice they get from these helpful hackers.

--SMartin