The Last Hope (afterwards)

Man, The Last Hope was a blast. I'm still trying to get over it ending...

I went with my good friend Matthew. I saw several talks of interest. The first talk I went to was ``Botnet Research, Mitigation and the Law.'' It was really interesting to hear from a lawyer as to what can and cannot be done when investigating these botnets. I have to find his email, however, because there were some more questions I wanted to ask him about this.

The next talk I went to was Kevin Williams Death Star Threat Modeling talk. It was really good and really funny. It was funny to see security models explained in a Star Wars way...

I really enjoyed the presentation by Lady Ada and pt. It was really interesting to see all of the things they could do with hardware. I was inspired :-) It was funny that they had their phone jammer there to block cell calls during the talk. I was kinda surprised how many cell phones went off during talks prior to that.

I also saw the ``Hacking Cool Things with Microcontrollers'' talk by Mitch Altman. It was interesting. He seems like an interesting guy with his cool colored hair :-) I liked his TV-be-gone product.

After a nice break, Matthew and I went to see the Cold Boot Memory Forensics talk. During the talk, the crowd was informed that some code was released as well. This was a very interesting talk. I'll have more to say on this one later...

The last talk I went to the first night was the Hacking FOIA talk. I missed some good talks that night, but there was not much I could do. I just couldn't stay.

Alright, I'm not going to list all of the other talks I went to, but a few. As for the pics, forgive me, I didn't have my usual camera with me so these didn't turn out as well...



The Steven Levy talk was quite funny. I liked the part where he talked about interviewing Steve Jobs.



Steven Rambam's talk was LONG... 3 hours scheduled... and it went into overtime with the questions... and a lot of it was already covered in his other talk. Still, I had a good time. There's something about his assertiveness that I can't help but appreciate.



I got to meet some interesting people like Bernie S:



and Emmanuel Goldstein:



(who looks as if he's plotting things here...)

I must say, I really enjoyed the social engineering panel. It was really funny, and useful to prove just how much information you can get and how some people are a little too trusting. Maybe that shows that some people are still basically good... I'm not sure.

Even though I had planned to stay for Kevin Mitnick's talk, it was really late and things had been pushed back by almost an hour. I just couldn't stay any longer with DH at home alone...

On the last day, I have to say that the most interesting talks I went to were the two Pen Testing talks: (Pen testing using LiveCds by Thomas Wilhelm and Pen testing using Firefox by DaKahuna and ThePrez98), Adam Savage and Postal Hacking. All but the Postal Hacking talk were packed full. (i'll write more on this later...)

Edit: You can find torrents of some of the talks here.