12 Intriguing Scenes From Black Hat 2008
Wheel Of Odds
Fortify, a San Mateo, Calif.-based application security vendor, attracted visitors to its booth by running a Wheel Of Fortune-type game that showcased its ability to pick out potentially exploitable vulnerabilities early in the app development lifecycle, as well as interesting outfits featuring pink feathers.
Breathless Anticipation
Conference attendees started cramming into the room where Dan Kaminsky's DNS vulnerability presentation was held about 30 minutes before the end of the previous session, and the room quickly became a whole lot more packed than this. The audience's breathless anticipation prior to the talk eventually became actual breathlessness as the room's oxygen was quickly depleted.
Rock Star
Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration and a veteran of many Black Hat speeches, gave Black Hat attendees what they were hoping for: An unvarnished view of what he says is the most serious security threat the Internet has faced in more than a decade.
Silence Of The Lambs
For years a staple of the DefCon security conference, the Wall Of Sheep was on display at this year's Black Hat show, highlighting the user names of attendees using insecure wireless connections.
McAfee's Mystery
Although details were sketchy, and booth staff declined ChannelWeb's request to explain what was going on here, it appeared that McAfee was either running some sort of virtual reality game for Black Hat attendees, or re-creating a scene from the 1977 classic "The Island Of Dr. Moreau."
Security Of The Glowing Eggs
Network security specialists Blue Coat, which is still digesting its $268 million acquisition of Packeteer, was on hand to show how colorful glowing eggs can be a vital part of any company's security strategy.
Spooky Action Up Close
The National Institute Of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National University Of Singapore used Black Hat as a stage for their Quantum Spookshow, a demonstration of how elements of quantum cryptography are beginning to have practical use in security applications.
Beaming With Curiosity
National Institute Of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National University Of Singapore staff encouraged Black Hat attendees to interact with the single-photon wide light beams that constituted the physical link of its four-node quantum network.
Puzzle Pieces
Cenzic, based in Santa Clara, Calif., handed out puzzle pieces as part of a contest aimed at raising its profile in the Web application security space.
Safety Of The Sandbox
Norwegian security vendor Norman showed off its SandBox Analyzer, a utility that helps speed up the process of analyzing malware and determining its potential impacts.
Nowhere To Hide
ArcSight, which went public earlier this year, was trumpeting the capabilities of its ArcSight Logger appliance, which captures and analyzes all enterprise log data while providing a self-managing log repository.
Stepping Up
Microsoft had a busy week at the Black Hat conference, first announcing it will share technical details of its monthly patches with security vendors, then revealing plans to have its researchers alert third party vendors of bugs in their applications.