Hackers meet for coding festival
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The BBC and Yahoo are holding a hack day for web developers and designers.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft is inviting hackers onto its Redmond, Washington, campus again next week, and this time, software virtualization and mobile security will be the hot topics. The company's semi-annual BlueHat hacking conference will run Thursday and Friday, giving Microsoft engineers and executives a chance to hear first-hand reports on the latest in computer security research. This will be Microsoft's sixth BlueHat conference since it introduced the event in early 2005. This year, representatives from such companies as Symantec, 3Com's TippingPoint division, and Sourcefire will speak on topics ranging from embedded system security, software "fuzzing," and exploit creation, according to a preliminary schedule of the event obtained by the IDG News Service. "The BlueHat speakers, both leading external security researchers and internal Microsoft engineers, will pierce the security veil of virtualization and process isolation," wrote Microsoft security group manager Andrew Cushman on the BlueHat blog. "Plus, we've got a couple of talks on Windows Mobile and more about automated exploit creation -- this time using Metasploit." There will also be a discussion of WabiSabiLabi's controversial exploit marketplace given by Roberto Preatoni, strategic director with the company, according to the preliminary agenda. Friday morning will be devoted to a discussion of mobile hacking tools and techniques, and software virtualization will be discussed later in the day. A more up-to-date agenda is expected to be posted within a few days, according to Microsoft's public relations agency. Usually Microsoft says nothing about its BlueHat hacking conferences prior to the event, but this year, the company preannounced the confab, saying it wants to be a little more up-front about what's going on. "BlueHat is unique and still a closed door conference for MS product teams, but this year we will open up a little -- with info about the conference before it starts and with more info made available during the conference," Cushman wrote.
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The Source Code Club is back in business, if you can call it that. The anonymous hacker group first began peddling proprietary source code last July, then disappeared, and now has reemerged
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INSPECTOR Hacker of the Yard has fingered the collar of a UK man suspected of stealing source code from Cisco Systems in May. Cyber plods from the Metropolitan Police Computer Crime Unit swooped on houses
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An international conference opened Wednesday amid warnings that companies, governments and individuals are increasingly vulnerable to Internet attacks by terrorists, hackers and others that rob them of privacy, money, and secrets.
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Next week's BlueHat hacking conference will focus on virtualization, "fuzzing," and security for Windows Mobile.
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(InfoWorld) - While stopping short of volunteering to host the event, Mozilla chief security official Window Snyder said that it could prove helpful for the open-source community to meet at its own conference to debate secure coding, vulnerability reporting, and product patching issues. In a recent interview with InfoWorld, Snyder -- whose official title with browser maker Mozilla is "chief security something or other" -- said that she would back a meeting of open-source software developers centered on a discussion of security issues. Working at Microsoft as part of its Secure Windows Initiative prior to joining Mozilla in 2006, Snyder helped organize Blue Hat, the software giant's now annual closed-door meeting with security researchers. Security has vastly improved in the open-source community over the last several years as an increasing number of contributors have stepped up to identify software vulnerabilities and help ward off potential attacks, but such a meeting of the minds could help developers improve their products even further, Snyder said. The event wouldn't likely adopt the same closed-door approach as Blue Hat, to which media members and other security industry onlookers remain uninvited, and security researchers and open-source developers would need to focus on both existing issues, such as improving vulnerability disclosure methods, and emerging topics, such as new threats aimed specifically at open-source technologies, according to the expert. If created, the event would likely take on the same grassroots feel of smaller security research conferences, such as the annual ShmooCon gathering in Washington, she said. "It would take a lot of work to coordinate, and we would need a lot of people to organize it, but something like [an open-source Blue Hat] could be very useful," Snyder said. "Anyone who wanted to contribute would have to be welcomed, and the idea would have to be to help people make their own security decisions more intelligently rather than to put pressure on people to change the ways they build things." Backers of the open-source model have long defended that they enjoy a significant advantage over makers of proprietary software -- such as Microsoft -- in the area of finding and patching security flaws in their products. Unlike Microsoft, which keeps its code under wraps and issues monthly updates that typically contain patches for multiple vulnerabilities that have been publicly identified by researchers, open-source companies like Mozilla -- perhaps best known for its Firefox browser -- have legions of contributors who attempt to find and fix any problems in its freely-distributed code on an ongoing basis. The ability to respond to problems so rapidly, and tap into a wider group of security experts in the form of the larger open-source community currently makes Firefox a more secure alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer and other proprietary software products, Snyder contends. By meeting as an industry, open-source security experts could also glean more detailed feedback from researchers, she said, as open-source flaws are typically only approached as an element of any published papers issued by security technology vendors. "The majority of reports that come out of the security researchers have a tremendous amount of knowledge, and we would love to get further involved in the overall process and understand the coding implications of what they find," Snyder said. "We could get more suggestions on building out our architecture in the future, which is something we always want to have an eye on." Overall, the security expert said that the open-source model continues to prove itself as advantageous in fighting off attacks, especially as Mozilla continues to hear from a growing number of people who are actively scouring its products for potential issues. "Transparency continues to be one of Mozilla's key factors for success," she said. "Some people might see it as an obstacle in terms of doing security with the whole world watching, and at times it can be a challenge, but we have ten thousand people testing our nightly builds, which is a lot more than you find on your typical browser development team."
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Nick Halstead has announced a contest on his blog today for PHP developers everywhere to participate in - a programming competition surrounding a challenge he's created.   It has been a lot harder than I thought to come up with a fair programming challenge that would not take too long or require lots of knowledge in any particular framework or other associated technology. It could have been to make use of a whole host of currently available API's and to make a useful mash-up but these again require other external knowledge beyond just PHP. I finally settled on a logic problem that is hopefully not too hard to solve but will test a range of PHP skills.   The problem he's worked up involves changing a word, one letter at a time, into another word using user-defined lists and choice of word. There's several requirements you'll need to follow an d rules for things like the submission process and what server setup can be used.   So, what's the motivation? First prize is a copy of Zend Studio Professional and a year of support, second prize is a Zend t-shirt, and third is a Zend Pen. For full information on participating and on all of the rules you'll need to follow, check out Nick's full post.
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Initiative focuses on popular scripting language with the aim to improve security.
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A dispute about the security of RFID access techniques - and how to hack them - is heating up at a government-themed trade show.
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Wired's geek festival comes up big this year with lifelike robots, homes of the future and immersive games. Peep a preview of this weekend's activities.
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People around the world are coming together to celebrate the world wide web and its impact on people.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will host a invite-only conference two months from now that will bring together security experts from law enforcement, Internet service providers, and the technology industry. The Internet Security Operations and Intelligence (ISOI) workshop will be held on August 27 and 28 at the Academy for Educational Development in Washington D.C. It is expected to draw about 240 participants who will engage in a frank discussion of the latest trends in cybercrime, said Gadi Evron, a security evangelist with Beyond Security who is one of the event's planners. "It's an organized group of volunteers from all across the industry, governments, and services," he said via instant message. "All trusted people, all people who do something extra than their job... We respond to international threats and mitigate them, and establish global cooperation across borders daily." The conference will be hosted by the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team, part of the Department of Homeland Security. This group has met previously in hush-hush events hosted on the campuses of Microsoft and Cisco Systems, and has helped in the response to a number of cyber-crime incidents including the denial of service attacks in Estonia and the recent compromise of Miami's Dolphin Stadium Web site, whichÂ was hackedÂ just days before the stadium played host to the National Football League's Super Bowl game. Because the conference is attended by a pre-screened audience (the press is not invited, thank you very much), presenters at the ISOI workshops offer a deeper level of technical detail than at other events, said Dan Hubbard, vice president of security research with Websense, who is presenting in August. "It really helps communicate the struggles on both sides of the coin." Hubbard will be discussing a new tool he has developed for detecting infections of social networking Web sites, called HoneyJax. Similar to a "honeypot" computer, which is designed to lure cyber-attackers, HoneyJax "allows you to track exploits in the Web 2.0 world and helps assist in the identification of misuse of these technologies" Hubbard said. Other scheduled talks will cover topics such as theÂ Estonian cyber-attacks, the use of Web-based mail for spam, and "Phishing and the IRS." Speakers will be from organizations such as Cisco, AOL, McAfee, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and the Computer Emergency Response Team of Estonia. The workshops attract a "pretty good spread of people," said Exploit Prevention Labs Chief Technology Officer Roger Thompson, another presenter. "It's really just a forum for security professionals in different disciplines to get together and talk over a beer." Â
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'We are just a factory producing ammunition' Interview In June 2006, three Russian programmers started testing a collection of PHP scripts and exploit code to automate the compromise of computers that visit malicious websites.â¦
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Programmers, entrepreneurs, students and lawyers gather in mid-town Manhattan for an ad hoc conference on the latest web trends. Participation is required and shoes are not allowed. David Cohn reports from New York City.
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By Leslie Brooks Suzukamo, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.  Dec. 16--With pints of beer in hand and a laptop computer tucked into a backpack, Paul Wenzel and Justin Heideman waited among a crowd of techies in a South Minneapolis bar for their turn to show off the new software they made.
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Within days of the release of the security bulletin, there was proof of concept code available on the web. As the exploit was analyzed by various security groups, it was found that it was similar