Misc story time:
tldr: I've been collecting security conference stickers for 20+ years and just now got around to using them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm not the kind of person to put stickers on my laptop. This means that for 23 years (apparently), when I got stickers from a conference, I kept them, put them in a bag, moved them from house-to-house, but never actually did anything with them. Until now.

I finally found a usage; which is decorating the otherwise-sketchy-looking metal ammo case which @VeronicaKovah & I are now using to carry phones with us to trainings. We watched some videos on youtube that make it seem like those LiPo fire-protection bags would do a whole lot of not-much in the event that a fire broke out on one of the batteries. But a simple metal box seemed to do a lot better in terms of containing the flames.

So we of course expect that airport security will always stop us when traveling with them (though at least this time our TSA pre-check status seemed to give us a pass on the way out). But the expectation is that contrary to what you might thing, adding hacking conference stickers will actually be disarming, rather than alarming, with security personnel - at least when compared to the alternative of seeing a raw ammo canister ;)

The oldest sticker seems to be from DEF CON 10 (X), circa 2002 (my first DEF CON was 8 FWIW). In general I don't seek out stickers, but I do think the BadBIOS and "I want to believe" ones are things I probably got from Joe Fitz as they were of-the-moment and relevant to my interests. (If you're not familiar with the latter, it's from a very FUDish cover article [1]). I could have completely filled them, but I left a little bit of space for the future. Check out the larger pics for a potential stroll down memory lane. (RIP Shmoocon, Hackademic.info, NoSuchCon. Memento mori conference organizers ;))

#DEFCON, #BlackHat, #ShmooCon, #BlueHat, #RingZer0, #HackLU, #HardwearIO, #DistrictCon, #HackFest, #NoSuchCon, #DeepSec, #HITB, #HackersOnTheHill

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

For those interested ERNW has published a useful summary of HITB 2023¹ covering the following talks:

* Dr. Bramwell Brizendine – "Windows Syscalls in Shellcode: Advanced Techniques for Malicious Functionality"
* Eran Shimony & Omer Tsarfati – "ChatGPT: Please write me a polymorphic malware"
* Alex Plaskett & McCaulay Hudson – "Your Not So Home Office – SOHO Hacking at Pwn2Own"
* Haoyu Yang – "XRP Raid Protector: Killing a Critical Bug Worth 40 Billion Dollars"
* Tao Sauvage – "Compromising Garmin’s Sport Watches"
* Tim Blazytko & Moritz Schloegel – "The Next Generation of Virtualization-based Obfuscator"
* Kaijern Lau – "3 Years in China – A Tale of Building a REAL Full-Speed Anti-Censorship Router"

#HITB #SecurityConference
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¹ https://insinuator.net/2023/05/hack-in-the-box-security-conference-2023-amsterdam-summary/

Great preso by Saumil Shah @ theRealSaumil, winding up the last #HITB Amsterdam with a quick review of infosec 2003-23, mostly overlapping my career. So many flashbacks... and reminders of why I gave up! via @thegrugq

https://www.slideshare.net/saumilshah/the-hand-that-strikes-also-blocks

I'll be at #HITB Amsterdam tomorrow and Friday. I'm specifically looking forward to the iOS / OS X Security panel discussion on Friday!

#HITB2023AMS

My next 4-day class "Software Deobfuscation Techniques" in which you learn how to analyze and break protected code will be given at HITB Amsterdam from April 17 to 20.

Link: https://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2023ams/product/software-deobfuscation-techniques-hitb2023ams/

#HITBSecTrain #HITB #HITB2023AMS

𝔹𝕦𝕚𝕝𝕕 𝕒 ℚ𝕦𝕒𝕟𝕥𝕦𝕞 ℂ𝕠𝕞𝕡𝕦𝕥𝕖𝕣 𝕒𝕥 ℍ𝕠𝕞𝕖

In this talk, we aim to explain how this new type of powerful digital processing works, as well as how we built our own Quantum Computer — without a PhD in quantum physics. Instead, we describe our efforts to build Quantum Computing hardware using a hacker’s DIY approach. Through our own experiments, we discuss our failures, our success, our progress around this challenging goal!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3bZGpFi2pE

#HITBCyberWeek #hitb