Forwarded from: security curmudgeon <jericho (at) attrition.org> cc: tjohnson (at) bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com : http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080613/NEWS02/806130314/1007/NEWS02 : : By Tim Johnson : Free Press Staff Writer : June 13, 2008 : : NORTHFIELD -- The contest among computer-savvy graduate students was : billed as a kind of novel spectator sport. : : It didn't work out that way, though, thanks to -- what else? -- some : sort of technical glitch that obstructed efforts to monitor what the : competitors were doing. So for the few non-techie spectators who : showed up, the business of hacking was still as opaque and mysterious : at the end of the 1 1/2-hour exercise as it was in the beginning. : This year, the challenge was more complex. Justin Peltier, a : computer-security consultant from Michigan, was on hand with another : simulated system that competitors were invited to break in to. They : The commentary was to come from Peter Stephenson, a member of the : program's faculty, who sat at his own terminal and displayed on a big : screen something he called a "sniffer trace," a multi-colored table : with : The minutes passed, and not much happened. The sniffer trace stayed : the same, and from time to time, when Stephenson tried to check on : what individual teams were up to, the screen went blank. Could it be : that the hackers weren't getting anywhere? : Could the monitoring system have fallen victim to hacking, someone : wondered. Unlikely, someone else said, but who could say for sure? "I'll take 'Routing Basics' for 100 Alex!" "In a nutshell, the problem these security 'professionals' encountered." "What is 'switched routing'?" "That's correct, 100 points for you." _______________________________________________ Attend Black Hat USA, August 2-7 in Las Vegas, the world's premier technical event for ICT security experts. Featuring 40 hands-on training courses and 80 Briefings presentations with lots of new content and new tools. Network with 4,000 delegates from 50 nations. Visit product displays by 30 top sponsors in a relaxed setting. http://www.blackhat.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Tue Jun 17 2008 - 02:07:43 PDT