I’ve never attended a HOPE conference but I had always wanted to make the bi-annual pilgrimage to “PE 6-5000“, NYC’s Hotel Penn, home of the fabled “oldest continuing telephone number”.
For the uninitiated, 2600: The Hacker Quarterly throws the Hackers On Planet Earth conference. It’s attendees range from retired phone phreaks, to malware script kiddies, and everyone in between. Not as infamous of a spectacle as DEFCON or Blackhat but still my kind of conference. Just like the zine, HOPE was low key and full of wide ranging content and hacker inspired fun.
The Eleventh HOPE held talks and panels running the gamut of radio operation, computer networking, software security, and even hacker comedy. Some of my favorite talks included,…
- Understanding Tor Onion Services and Their Use Cases, where I learned more about one of Tor’s killer apps, punching holes in NATs and serving your home IoT devices outside the public internet.
- Iridium Satellite Hacking, using Software Defined Radio to track a global comsat network and how Iridium’s packets were analyzed and ultimately decrypted.
- Medical Devices: Pwnage and Honeypots, demonstrating once again that hospital radiation machines and wide open MS ADs based networks are kind of scary.
- CAPTCHAs – Building and Breaking, utilizing machine learning algos for breaking CAPTCHA systems, as well as building one.
- Keynote: Cory Doctorow, I’ll just leave this right here.
I highly recommend the remaining videos once they’re released.
In the end, Hackers On Planet Earth was exactly like walking into a 2600 magazine. It was also a great excuse to visit New York for the weekend. I can’t wait to attend in 2018.