Breaking Badness Cybersecurity Podcast - 191. Hacker Summer Camp Retrospective
In this week’s episode of the Breaking Badness Cybersecurity Podcast, Kali Fencl, Daniel Schwalbe, and Malachi Walker discuss all things Hacker Summer Camp! Daniel comes in as a Hacker Summer Camp veteran with a few tours of duty under his belt, while Kali and Malachi (who also joins Breaking Badness for the first time) come in as first timers.
What is Hacker Summer Camp?
For those who don’t know, Hacker Summer Camp is a casual term used to describe a series of conferences that take place in Las Vegas each summer. The conferences included are:
- Black Hat
- DEF CON
- BSides Las Vegas
- The Diana Initiative (unfortunately the Breaking Badness team didn’t get a chance to attend The Diana Initiative this year, so we won’t be able to cover this one on the podcast)
Black Hat focuses more on high-profile keynotes and workshops and includes the vendor show floor (of which DomainTools took part). DEF CON is more informal and features various “villages,” presentations, Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions, and other competitions or hands-on activities. BSides Las Vegas is a smaller, community-driven event, but is the largest BSides in the country. Finally, the Diana Initiative (TDI) promotes diversity and inclusion in the cybersecurity field and includes its own keynotes and workshops.
What Resonated with Us?
One of the talk tracks at DEF CON was called War Stories. Malachi was able to attend several of these and one that resonated with him was the story Joseph Cox from 404 Media provided regarding the Anom company who provided encrypted phone services to the criminal underground, allowing them to communicate for several years, but it came out that it was actually run by the FBI. They got real-time copies of all the messages on a side channel and was working as expected by the criminals, but every single detail was captured in real-time as it was being sent, creating a treasure trove. Daniel is currently reading the book Dark Wire, which is based on this story and written by Cox.
Daniel went to a talk about encrypted messages within 19th century newspapers presented by crypto experts Elonka Dunin and Klaus Schmeh. It was apparently common to publish advertisements in the late 1800s that had a shared key that the receiving party would know how to decrypt. Newspapers back then were distributed on the other end of the world, so traveling family members would buy these newspapers, find that message, use their key, and decrypt the message their family had for them. The talk was around how many of these messages there were and was popular for a number of years. There are still a number of messages that are actually still not cracked and there are people to this day trying to decrypt them.
Listen to the full episode for more information on sessions we found intriguing and tips and tricks to get through a week at Hacker Summer Camp!
Breaking Badness Black Hat Podcast Mini Series
Kali spent much of her time at Black Hat conducting interviews with practitioners, analysts, and C-Suites within the industry, ending with 16 interviews that we plan to share with our listeners in the coming weeks. Kali, joined by Daniel Schwalbe, Sean McNee, and Taylor Wilkes-Pierce interview folks from wide ranging backgrounds and discuss a myriad of topics including what it’s like to build a start-up during a pandemic, industry control systems, the direction ransomware gangs are taking, bug bounty programs, and so much more.
Be sure to check back and tune into Breaking Badness for these insightful sessions!
