In the movie Sneakers, there is a defining moment when Robert Redford rearranges Scrabble tiles to figure out that ‘SETEC ASTRONOMY’ is actually an anagram. With this in mind, I give you: SETEC CONFER MOAN (Yo!) (Click for full size) I’m not saying that InfoSec Conferences are bad (although many a battered liver would disagree), but what i am saying is that we don’t seem to be improving our security posture at the same rate as we seem to be …
Author: haroon meer
On January 6th, Apple launched their Mac App Store. Pundits have taken pretty polarizing views on the store, with some hailing it as a boon to indie developers (since they can (trivially) publish to a world stage without worrying about credit card transactions) while others say that this is yet another way for Apple to exert big brother type control. I think it’s a healthy dose of both. As I mentioned in the past, Apple does have an amazing ability …
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 …
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 …