An evening in the life of a hacker

Joint TF-CSIRT/FIRST Meeting

Tuesday — January 29th, 2008 16:40

Not content with breaking (into) other people's hardware, Adam Laurie likes to get up on his own roof and tinker with his satellite dish, and has also been known to discharge projectile weapons at perfectly serviceable computer equipment... Following up on his "a day in the life of..." talk, Adam will present some of his works in progress, and will attempt to answer fundamental questions that bother him after a hard day's hacking, such as "What would happen if I fire this real gun at an online computer game?" and "Is that a satellite, or are you just pleased to see me?".

Presenters

• Adam Laurie (RFIDIOt, GB)

  Adam Laurie is a Director of The Bunker Secure Hosting Ltd. He started in the computer industry in the late Seventies, working as a computer programmer on PDP8 and other mini computers, and then on various Unix, Dos and CP/M based micro computers as they emerged in the Eighties. He quickly became interested in the underlying network and data protocols, and moved his attention to those areas and away from programming, starting a data conversion company which rapidly grew to become Europe's largest specialist in that field (A.L. downloading Services). During this period, he successfully disproved the industry lie that music CDs could not be read by computers, and, with help from his brother Ben, wrote the world's first CD ripper, 'CDGRAB'. At this point, he and Ben became interested in the newly emerging concept of 'The Internet', and were involved in various early open source projects, the most well known of which is probably their own -ApacheSSL - which went on to become the defacto standard secure web server. Since the late Nineties they have focused their attention on security, and have been the authors of various papers exposing flaws in Internet services and/or software, as well as pioneering the concept of reusing military data centres (housed in underground nuclear bunkers) as secure hosting facilities. Adam has been a senior member of staff at DEFCON (http://www.defcon.org) since 1997, and also acted as a member of staff during the early years of the Black Hat Briefings, where he is now a regular training instructor (http://www.blackhat.com), and he is also a member of the Bluetooth SIG Security Experts Group (http://www.bluetooth.org). His current focus is on RFID, and he has recently published an opensource RFID software library, written in Python, which can be found at http://rfidiot.org.