DEFCON 26 and Black Hat 2018 start up later this week. Again, I’m not going, but I do feel like I’m inching closer to making a return. Full-timers from my group have been sent to Black Hat in the past, so who knows what’s going to happen next year?
What would I do if I was there? A quick skim of the Black Hat briefings schedule doesn’t show a whole lot that really jumps out at me. I’d probably just be hitting targets of opportunity, with a few exceptions:
- “Stress and Hacking: Understanding Cognitive Stress in Tactical Cyber Ops” by Celeste Paul and Josiah Dykstra, because cognitive stress under pressure is something I’m interested in and has wider implications.
- “Reversing a Japanese Wireless SD Card – From Zero to Code Execution” by Guillaume Valadon.
- “Mental Health Hacks: Fighting Burnout, Depression and Suicide in the Hacker Community” by Christian Dameff and Jay Radcliffe, for obvious reasons.
- “Open Sesame: Picking Locks with Cortana“, with Amichai Shulman, Ron Marcovich, Tal Be’ery, and Yuval Ron. The lockpicking in this case looks less like actual physical lock sport: “In this presentation, we will reveal the “Open Sesame” vulnerability, a much more powerful vulnerability in Cortana that allows attackers to take over a locked Windows machine and execute arbitrary code.”
- “Applied Self-Driving Car Security” because Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek.
What about DEFCON 26? After the jump…