Cansecwest 09 is over and I am finally back home again fighting with the jetlag.The 10th Cansecwest, held in Vancouver, as usual, was again one of the best security conference to go to. Although Dragos is trying to get it to an organised conference where everything is starting at its correct time, chaos came back during day 2 where an electricity outage and a delay in the presentations brought Cansecwest back where it always was and what people, who were there the last years so much appreciated with the conference.
D
ragos and his team made really a very good job, although they could have tried for making the weather better but maybe putting the conference back to april will help to solve this problem, but then those that like to lengthen the conference with a trip to whistler wouldn't be happy anymore.So once again thanks again to Dragos and his team for making this happen.
Coming now to the conference itself, day one was mainly focused on how easy or difficult it is to break mobiel devices like iphones, G1s, Blackberries and alike and there were really some very interesting talks about it.
Day two and three were discussing subjects like:
getting keystrokes by analysing eletrical signals froma PC,
how the situation of malware writers is in china,
Persistant BIOS infection and rootkits aso.
There was also the now famous pwn2own contest where interesting prices such as Laptops and money prices up to 10000$ were waiting for the players.
Although nobody hacked the mobile devices the brwoser contest was only a matter of minutes to some ppl until the hacked into them.
Charlie Miller won the contest of the Safari browser hack as he was the first to attempt hacking the Safari browser on Mac OSX and made it directly but there were also two other guys that were successfull in getting into it.
In this context one person (Nils) was hitting all the records as he was able to break into Safari, Firefox and IE8. He was infact the real winner of this context.
Nils, who I had the chance of having a little conversation with, is a german student finishing his masters thesis at the university of Oldenburg. He is hunting bugs for years now and it was not the first time he sold bugs to ZDI in fact he was financing his studies with his capabilities. :-)
He decided to come out this year as once he has finished his studies, he is looking for a job in the business and Cansecwest is definately the best place to get former employers being interested in you. So now he has probably the choice of the job he wants to get and can finish his studies wihtout fear of unemployment. :-)
Nils, I wish you all the best and maybe we will meet each other again later next year. :-)
