DEFCON notes: Day 3, or “Killing Priest won’t bring back your G–d–n honey!”

Apparently, one of the pools at the Riviera was overrun by killer bees. The fake ATM has been well covered elsewhere.

Final set of quick takes:

RAID Recovery: Recover Your PORN By Sight and Sound”: Technically, a pretty decent presentation on recovering RAID, building on Moulton’s previous presentations on the inner workings of hard drives and their recovery/rebuilding. (Those presentations are linked here: I’m actually pretty interested in the one on SSD drives.)
Key takeaways:

  • Many people don’t understand RAID levels; they think that RAID 0 actually offers some protection against data loss, or there’s no hurry to replace that one drive in the RAID 5 that failed. (The presenter seemed to believe that photographers are particularly bad about these things, perhaps based on bitter personal experience.)
  • If you have a RAID full of pictures, some sub-$100 tools, along with intelligent analysis of reconstructed images, can help you rebuild the array. Even if you don’t know what order the drives were in originally.

“Cracking 400,000 Passwords, Or How To Explain to Your Roomate why the Power Bill Is a Little High” (preview): Or, how to use John the Ripper, and how to optimize your JtR runs.
Key takeaway: Lists of previously cracked passwords are good fodder for JtR. Would you believe people use the same password on more than one site? Even better, you can use lists of previously cracked passwords to build JtR word mangling rules.

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