BH2011

Articles

• Blackhat 2011 – Briefings Key Note and Stuff?
  3 August 2011, by Michael Hayes CTO of B-4-U Inc. / ROBOTS-4-U

  Over the last two years, Blackhat has been growing and changing and this year was no exception. Attendance is up, vendors are out in full force and the speaker list is gelling. With this in mind, some of the major tracks included this year cover “Bit Flow”, “Threat Intelligence” and “Breaking Software”. Of notable interest is “Macs in the age of ATP” and “Weapons of Targeted Attack”, within threat intelligence”, Dan Kaminsky is also presenting “Black OPS of TCP/IP”, which looks like another key (...)

• DEFCON 19 - 2011 – Overview of the Conference
  6 August 2011, by Michael Hayes CTO of B-4-U Inc. / ROBOTS-4-U

  DEFCON is one of the largest INFOSEC conferences in the U.S.A., with a twist or two or three. Some of the key differentiators of this conference are the client base, presenters and affordability. The clients are typically the individuals that work the key boards across organizations across the nation and in some cases the world. This organization is highly populated by volunteers; the presenters are generally security practitioners and are individuals, not corporations and the price for (...)

• Black Hat 2011 – Shark Week Continues with “Chip & Pin” and SQUARE
  7 August 2011, by Michael Hayes CTO of B-4-U Inc. / ROBOTS-4-U

  Even with this being Shark week, the biggest predators may be the banks with EMV drawing blood from the consumers even with their standard not fully implemented. Protection from sharks can be helped by tightening the implementation of the standard, and hopefully most aspects of this will be implemented before it lands in the U.S. . SQUARE on the other had is a light weight tool, that may help small vendors, but there is doubt that it would pass a PCI audit, this in-itself is not a deal (...)

• Black Hat 2011 – Intelligence Track
  5 August 2011, by Michael Hayes CTO of B-4-U Inc. / ROBOTS-4-U

  The delivery of new attack vectors can come from something as simple as an e-mail, with this being the deliberate beginning of APT type attack. Other less conventional approaches can be launched from a physical device like an UAV, and this in itself can produce a large number of new issues to deal with, that may perplex the traditional security person and the INFOSEC expert.
  Michael Hayes CTO of B-4-U Inc. / ROBOTS-4-U
  As we cruise through the conference, a couple of interesting (...)

• Black Hat 2011 – The Myth of the Mac
  5 August 2011, by Michael Hayes CTO of B-4-U Inc. / ROBOTS-4-U

  The average MAC user clearly believes that they are safe from most malicious attacks whether a virus, a Trojan or other forms of attack. This is evidenced by only 20% of MAC users even implementing basic security or virus checkers on their MACs. Compared to Windows-based machines, MACs only represent 6 to 8% of the total market, and therefore are not as big a target to the writers of malicious code, just due to the pure economics of WINDOWS vs OS X. Having said that, MAC is by no means (...)