http://teh-win.blogspot.com/ has (as usual) an amusing read up, which at one step harps on a point that I can't support enough: 0days != hacking. Almost all "real" hacking is done via transitive trust (thus the same goes for pentests). 0days allow you to more quickly get _some_ trust to exploit transitively, but the "real" work is done on transitive trust. And transitive trust and "real" hacking gets too little credit at security conferences, mainly because any "real" research here is by direct implication illegal ("... I wrote this worm that exploits transitive trust ... and I have some empirical data on it's spreading capabilities *cough* ...").
Now I just need to find a dictionary that explains me what "branler la nouille en mode noyau" means ;)
Being read by a nice looking security star is always an ego boost! Thanks Halvar for your nice words.
ReplyDeleteWhile I do not like being despised by most "vocal" security people (mailing lists, blogs, ...) for being a security consultant, I do not believe "real" hacking has its place in security conferences.
Once upon a time it could be nice to have someone talk about real world methodologies (I found the excel file with all the passwords), but it would get old really fast (I found the domino database/text file/nis domain/unprotected ldap server with all the passwords).
The only fun part is in hacking custom stuff, but you can't talk about this.
Watching a talk about uninitialized local variables, even if I know I'll never need this knowledge in "real life", is way more exciting than another honeypot talk.