[ Black Hat Vegas 2008 Recap ]

First of all, I want to say thank you to all the people who came out and supported Nate, John and I for our talk.


We had a great turnout despite the fact that we were talking in the same time slot as such notable speakers (Dowd, Sotirov, Rutkowska, MSRC, Grossman). The audience was great (including the huge EY contingent that showed up) and we got some wonderful feedback after. We also did a podcast with Rich Mogull of Securosis right after the talk which you can find here.

On top of all this, Nate, Billy Rios and I won the Pwnie Award for Best Client Side Attack (which should have gone to Mark Dowd btw). This year's Black Hat Vegas (only my second) was a great time. I got to meet some great people and hang in some swanky places.

Special thanks to the entire Black Hat crew for having us come out and give our talk.

Now it's time to get back to the research ;)

[ We're In @ Black Hat Vegas ]

Holy crap! I can't believe we actually got in!


The first computer security conference I ever attended was Black Hat Vegas last year and now I'm going to be speaking there with Nate McFeters, Billy Rios and John Heasman. Crazy. I've spoken now at Black Hat Japan, Federal and Europe, but Vegas is The Big Show. Thanks to everybody who voted for us.

Our talk is entitled "The Internet Is Broken: Beyond document.cookie - Extreme Client Side Exploitation". We're going to show some pretty sick stuff there and it's going to be a two-session deal. Prepare yourself for a brain-meltingly awesome talk.



See you in Vegas!

[ toorcon Seattle was Awesome ]

I had a great time at toorcon Seattle. The talks were awesome.


Dan Kaminsky dropped a bomb about how ISPs were taking non-existent subdomains and redirecting them to ad-servers. And let's say these web sites serving up these ads contain an XSS...yeah, MASS pwnage. Gotta love how docucment.domain works. Dan actually rickrolled us all.

And then John Heasman's talk about the Java browser plugin and Java Web Start was equally enlightening. Sun has some major problems in their implementations of certain aspects of Java. Anyway, I hope Kev is included more in the next version of his talk...

Katie Moussouris gave a pretty interesting talk on her role at Microsoft and what they're trying to do for responsible disclosure...WHAT? I said Microsoft really is advocating responsible disclosure these days...WHAT?! I said Microsoft seems to really be turning things around...OK!!!!


The talk Nate and I did on URI Use and Abuse seemed to get a good response as well. Anyway, there were other great talks that I'm too tired to include right now, but I just want to commend the toorcon team. They really outdid themselves with the parties they threw at the Public N3rd Area and the Last Supper Club. Hats off to all of them. Toorcon San Diego last year was the first one I had ever been to but I'm going to try to make it a point to come back to as many toorcons as possible.


Especially the one in the cooling tower of the half-built nuclear plant!

[ toorcon Seattle ]

Well, I'm in the beautiful city of Seattle and have just enjoyed the first night of the conference put on by h1kar1 and team. I loved the live DJ's and the Public N3rd Area.

But before I got there, I saw this on one of the screens at the airport in my home town:


At least they've upgraded from 98 to XP... Sorry for the blurry picture quality, I was in a hurry.

But it's time for me to get some sleep. Nate and I have to rework our talk to fit into a 20 minute slot. Can't wait to hear Dan Kaminsky and John Heasman's talks.