Defcon 15 - shud of been there fuxx

Defcon 15

Posted by samc on August 2nd, 2007

DEFCON 15 will be held August 4^th through 6^th, 2007. WiFi Planet has a good review on some of the activities:

Dozens of DEFCON speakers are scheduled to officially present new hacker tools and exploits. Many of those sessions focus on wireless vulnerabilities and the damage they can do. For example:

• The Church of Wi-Fi, which will host the DEFCON 15 Wireless Village, promises to show bigger, better, badder rainbow tables that further speed WPA cracking. David Hulton will demonstrate BTCrack, a Bluetooth PIN cracker that can guess up to 8-digit Bluetooth PINs in real-time by analyzing pairing captures.
• Midnight Research Labs will hand out liveCDs containing Wicrawl, a tool that probes discovered APs to separate the wheat from the chaf so that pen-testers can focus on the most “accessible, interesting, or relevant” targets.
• In a pair of sessions, WarDrivingWorld plans to delve into EV-DO card hacking and also demonstrate “simple techniques” for extending Wi-Fi range “beyond the standard 15-30 meters to 3-5 kilometers or more using home brew components.”
• Ricky Hill of Tenacity Solutions will demonstrate “Wireless GeoCaching,” the art of more precisely locating 802.11 APs using war-driving hardware and software.
• Researchers from AirTight Networks will demonstrate the fallibility of WEP Cloaking and a challenging version of AP spoofing (AKA Evil Twin or Honeypot APs) which they have dubbed the “Multipot.”

Prior to the WiFi hijacking demonstration, notes the BBC, many sites were thought to be safe because they encrypted the data swapped back and forth when people login. However, Robert Graham of Errata Security, carried out his attack on the unencrypted cookies, tiny text files, many sites use to identify people that regularly return.

BlackHat has a new section that highlights breaking security research submitted by leading corporate professionals, government experts, and members of the underground hacking community. If you’re using a secure connection to login via https, then you aren’t at risk, says Wired. If you’d like to force secure connections to GMail and your browser supports Greasemonkey, check out Mark Pilgrim’s handy script.

Will there be another Wi-Fi Shootout? Stay tuned.

• Broadband Reports notes that researcher Ermanno Pietrosemoli has the record for the longest Wi-Fi link: 238 miles (382 kilometres). Pietrosemoli used a combination of Intel gear and “off the shelf parts” to connect two computers in the Andes. He recorded 3Mbps connectivity between them.
• In Venezuela last year, a 167 mile link was obtained using a Linksys WRT54G and satellite dishes (pdf). An earlier 2003 record of 192 miles (310km) was made by Swedish scientists between a balloon and an Earth-bound station.
• A 2005 record of 137 miles between two terrestrial links beat a 125 mile record made a few months earlier. But the 137 mile link was not based on standard 802.11 wireless technology. Instead, they used proprietary radio technology from Trango. The companies used PacWireless 2-foot dishes.
• On July 30, 2005, during DefCon, a 125 mile long shot using stock Wi-Fi gear (and satellite dishes) was made. One half the team drove a trailer loaded with equipment to Utah Hill, near Beaver Dam in the state of Utah. Their comrades were located southwest of Las Vegas at the top of Mount Potosi. They used surplus 12 foot satellite dishes (above), home-welded support structures, and a couple of 300 mW, Z-Com s XI-325 radio cards with a power output of +25db and sensitivity of -84db (at 11 Mbps).

Predatory undercover reporter Michelle Madigan (Associate Producer of NBC Dateline) was publicly outed at DefCon and ran for cover.

source : dailywireless.org