Today i did a brief interview with E-TV news on “Anonymity Systems”. Interestingly enough, the journalist started the interview determined to go down the “Anonymity is Evil!” route. I must confess to being slightly surprised by the thought. I didn’t expect such strong support for the “Anonymity allows Child Pornography” point of view. The snippet of the interview that was aired was probably only a few minutes long (I have not seen it yet), but i thought it was probably …
Year: 2010
This weekend we held our 2nd ever ZaCon, The Conference in need of a tagline! ZaCon aims specifically at growing the South African InfoSec Research scene by giving locals a place to teach, learn and grow. The talk had people flying in from Durban, CapeTown and even Grahamstown, and almost doubled last year’s attendance. If nothing else, The coffee service was an unmistakable win! My talk this year was called “Fig Leaf Security”, and was aimed at saying some of …
iTried is a quick little utility I wrote while testing something. It sits on your menubar, and shows you the photograph of the last person who disturbed your screensaver (ie. tried to login). You can read more about it (and download it (free)) [here] …
It’s pretty common for people to hate Apple and to pick on the apple-tax, but then you spot something like this and you just have to smile (that special blend of fanboy smile!). The standard icon for textpad is clearly a text pad with a pen. I was looking into icons, and ended up maximizing the text pad icon. (click for full size) The quote was heavily used during early Apple commercials, but like many things Apple, it’s just the …
Nils Kreimeier wrote an article for Capital Magazine on cyber-war based on interviews he did at the CCDCOE conference earlier this year. The article is in German but does feature exciting Atari style graphics superimposed on scary looking hackers. [Grab a copy here] …
The Internet lit up last week with news of Intel’s purchase of McAfee. Every analyst (and his dog) has chimed in on what it means, from “Anti Virus on a chip”, to just “a national security disaster“. I think it has a subtler implication that bodes well for developing nations. – In the ongoing competition between hardware and software, hardware just flinched. Watching Intel spend almost a years worth of profit on McAfee made me think of Professor Clayton Christensen …
Hello. How ’bout that ride in? I guess that’s why they call it Sin City. [1] BlackHat this year passed in a blur. In retrospect staying in Vegas for only 3 nights was probably a bad idea. (This is especially obvious when you consider that the round trip involves about 60 hours of travelling time) I got in and mostly hid in my room working on the talk. I did the talk, and promptly hid in my room feeling sick …
July in information security means Vegas heat, dark t-shirts and “BlackHat“. Over the year there have been many new infosec conferences, but BlackHat remains the premier event for the infosec community. In a few minutes, i’ll start the >24hour journey towards the insanity^2 (Vegas is crazy, and the injection of the Defcon crew just dials up the crazy-meter). My talk this year turns me into infosec historian: “Memory Corruption Attacks: The (almost) Complete History… Buffer Overflows, Stack Smashes and Memory …
The CCDCOE (Cooperative Cyber DefenceCentre of Excellence) held its Conference on Cyber Conflict in Tallinn, Estonia. It was an interesting opportunity to see some of the issues that lurk beneath the “CyberWar” banner. Charlie Miller (of pwn2own fame) and i were invited to talk about things from an attackers perspective. Both our talks avoid the question of “Is the threat real?” (Which i think was answered awesomely by the talk given by Bryan Krekel and George Bakos of Northrop Grumman), …
The Mail & Guardian published their 2010 list of “200 Young South Africans you must take to Lunch“. According to their page: “These are young people who will shape our country in the decades to come, in the sporting arena, in public life and in business.” I made the list under Technology, which was really quite flattering. (thanks M&G, @singe) Deels forced me to attend the lunch (which i would normally have found an excuse to avoid), and i was …