You Can't Hack the Hackers-Defcon 27 (@ Las Vegas)

In June 2019 I started working with a penetration testing business called Pen Test Partners.

Now my background is in Software Development so my knowledge of the security ?? world only stretches to Matthew Broderick's 1983 movie 'Wargames'

So how best to submerge myself into this new sector and find out what it's all about??

.....yes, go to DefCon in Las Vegas ??

So roll forward a few weeks and I find myself being invited by Pen Test Partners to join the whole team in Las Vegas in August 2019 for DefCon 27.

WOW, what a great way to meet and find out more about the team at Pen Test Partners, plus an incredible opportunity to find out lots more about this new business sector I was jumping into.

So what is Defcon?

Well if you've not heard of it before, its one of the world's largest hacker conventions, and has been held each year in Las Vegas since 1993.

Now coming from the software development community I always thought of hackers as computer programmers going way back to the days of the "Home Brew Computer Club" and before.

....but Defcon is all about the world of "Security Hackers", who perhaps thanks to Matthew Broderick and Wargames are more synonymous with the "Hacker" label these days than programmers are.

The event itself is made up of some main 'tracks' of talks and events and a bunch of 'villages' focussing down on specific topic areas. So it's actually a bunch of mini-conferences within the same con.

All-in-all there was over 750 talks, workshops and other events taking place over the con so massive.

To get an idea of the scale there was near enough 30,000 attendees, hence why I said it's one of the biggest hacker events happening each year, and most likely one of the biggest tech events around.

Anyway back to the start of the trip...

On Tuesday I travelled down to Heathrow Airport in London from Birmingham with one of the Pen Test Partners team, who luckily was also into rock/metal music so the 2.5-hour drive went swiftly.

There were over 60 people going from Pen Test Partners, taking off from two airports in three-time slots. It's a big team and took a lot of planning to get everyone there.

Pen Test Partners actually had 14 talks accepted this year across both the main stage and villages covering Aviation, Automotive, Maritime, Privacy and Social Engineering, so it was a pretty major event for the company with a significant presence, so I was pretty excited to be joining them on the trip this year.

Right the journey.... well on the Wednesday morning after a large buffet breakfast?? it was a ten-hour journey to fly to Las Vegas from London, which if you include the waiting time from 7am in the morning to flight time it was a pretty long day travelling before we landed 3.30pm local time in Las Vegas.

After landing at McCarran International (LAS) Airport and getting the luggage - which took an age - and through customs, we were greeted with the first two of six stretch limo's booked to pick us all up and ply us with champagne.

Pen Test Partners had booked a two-storey suite as a team-base and also king-sized rooms for each of the team in Caesars Palace Hotel & Casino, so we were well and truly staying in style.

The rest of Wednesday on arrival was about settling in and finding our way around. Luckily there were many friendly locals only too happy to assist with directions like these two ladies I met, LOL

On Thursday at 6am three of us set off for breakfast ?? at Denny's before heading off for the Paris Hotel & Casino to get our event badges and pay our $300 cash entrance fee. They only take cash so with the gates open at 4.30am on Thursday morning they must have taken $9 million in cash that morning!

The badges were kind of cool...

The event itself took place across the Paris, Bally's, Planet Hollywood and Flamingo Hotels & Casinos so over a vast space, and I mean a vast space.

...but before starting on Thursday we decided to indulge in some sightseeing before some of the early talks started. We took in a bit of old vegas on Freemont Street and also the Mob Museum and generally walked around until sun stroke got the better of us and we returned to Caesars flat out.

It did mean I missed two Social Engineering talks I really wanted to see. DRAT!!

The first was by Robin Dreeke who is a best-selling author, professional speaker, trainer, facilitator, and retired FBI Special Agent and Chief of the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program. Robin has taken his life’s work of recruiting spies and broken the art of leadership and relationship building into Five Steps to TRUST. Since 2010, Robin has been working with large corporations as well as small companies in every aspect of their business. Whether it is newly promoted leaders, executives, sales teams, or customer relations, Robin has crafted his Code of Trust for quick results and maximum success. Robin has a lot of material on YouTube so well worth checking out.

The next was from Pen Test Partners very own Chris Pritchard aka @ghostie_ who did a talk called "The Basics of Social Engineering AKA How I break into Casinos, Airports and CNI"

It was a great talk that covered starting into Social Engineering (SE), from Pen Test Partners very own in-house Social Engineering expert.

Here's the same talk Chris did at the SteelCon 2018 event.

Chris also did a great follow-up interview with Security Weekly's, Matt Alderman whilst at Defcon which is well worth watching.

Another great Social Engineering talk I managed to see right at the end of Thursday after I'd had a little sleep! was a talk with Edward Miro called "Rideshare OSINT – Car Based SE For Fun & Profit", it was all about the social engineering implications of rideshare(Uber/Lyft) interactions. In this talk, Edward talked about the potential to use ride-sharing services as not only a highly accessible platform for practising social engineering and honing soft skills but also as a potential attack vector that is rarely considered by the casual rider. He drilled down and shared some of his real-life experiences experimenting with rideshare driving and how the small talk you probably already engage in can be leveraged against you.

I just have an amateur interest in Social Engineering but I usually do use every Uber ride as an opportunity to practice these skills. I took two Uber rides in Las Vegas and you'll be surprised just how much information someone will give you if you take an interest in them.

Here's the post-talk interview Edward did with Security Weekly's, Matt Alderman.

I was pretty tired at this point but managed to make it at 6.30pm to the Pen Test Partners meet-up in the team suite.... but despite the loud disco (I'm old skool) music and all the chatting I still managed to fall asleep until we all set off for a great meal and get together at Carmines Restaurant, which is located in the Forum Shopping centre inside Caesars Palace. The Forum is a vast shopping centre with a fake sky full of branded stores and great places to eat. It's vast and seems to go on for miles.

On to Friday morning and after another early breakfast ?? at Denny's the real event started.

The morning kicked off with two talks from Pen Test Partners in the "Hack The Sea Village".

First up we had Ken Munro who did a talk called "Sinking Ships & Stealing Containers from Ports: exploiting EDIFACT" followed by Andrew Tierney and Neil Boy doing a talk called "Maritime Pen Testing 101: Don’t poop on the poop deck", both at the Bally's Hotel.

Both fascinating talks in the high-barrier to entry niche of maritime security which is one of Pen Test Partner's specialisms.

I then high-tailed it over to Planet Hollywood to see Kevin Collier, Reporter, CNN, Kim Zetter, Cybersecurity & National Security Reporter, Eric Geller, Cybersecurity Reporter, Politico and Maggie MacAlpine, Co-Founder, Nordic Innovation Labs do a talk on "What Role Can Journalists Play in Securing Elections", followed by a talk "Social Media: The New Court of Public opinion (exploring the effects of social media and out unconscious bias)".

I then managed to catch Jack Cable's talk "Hacking the Air Force and Beyond: Engaging Hackers to Secure the U.S Department of Defense", Jack is a coder turned white-hat hacker and a rising sophomore at Stanford University. Jack is a top-ranked hacker on the HackerOne bug bounty platform, having identified over 350 vulnerabilities in companies including Google, Facebook, Uber, Yahoo, and the U.S. Department of Defense. After placing first in the Hack the Air Force challenge, Jack began working this past summer at the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service. There, Jack helped organize the Hack the Marine Corps competition held live in Las Vegas and advises policymakers on vulnerability disclosure. Jack was named one of Time Magazine’s 25 most influential teens for 2018. At Stanford, Jack studies computer science and launched Stanford’s bug bounty program, one of the first in higher education. All this and he's still just a teenager!

With lots of talks clashing I actually then headed back to the Bally's to see a Documentary made in 2000 called, Code Rush. It's about the lives of a group of Netscape software engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers Netscape's last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open-source project until their acquisition by AOL. It particularly focuses on the last-minute rush to make the Mozilla source code ready for release by the deadline of March 31, 1998, and the impact on the engineers' lives and families as they attempt to save the company from ruin.

This film was my kind of hacking so didn't want to miss it although you can catch it on YouTube here.

Watching the documentary I missed the next two Pen Test Partners talks which were "Lojack'd - pwning car alarms, vehicle trackers and immobilisers" with Ken Munro over at the Car Hacking Village, and "Pwning the Oil Rig" with Andrew Tierney and Chris Pritchard. Both talks I wanted to get to but there were so many talks on that day I missed so many I wanted to see.

In fact, by this point I was so tired I headed back to the Caesars Palace Hotel to rest and missed my final four talks. Missed dinner too I was so tired, drat!

I then set my alarm for three hours time as I had a car booked to pick me up outside Caesars at 7.15pm and take me off to Cheyenne Air for what was a three hour round trip adventure off to the Helicopter strip for a ride over Las Vegas at night. I really wanted to see the city lit up at night and this was the best way of doing it. Here is one snippet.

It was the first helicopter ride I'd been on in 19 years having previously taken a helicopter tour over the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and down the coast of Cairns in 2000, so was excited to do this flight over Las Vegas.

Back at Caesars by 10.30pm and was wiped out by then and ate a few Pringles and fell sleep!

What with Jet lag and long days I was late up on Saturday morning and skipped breakfast but managed to head over to see Pen Test Partners, Ken Munro and Alex Lomas at the Aviation Village doing a talk called "A hacker's First Solo: aeroplane and avionics security 101.". An airplane is a complex mix of legacy components and custom protocols, generally obscured from security researchers so as a result little is known in the research community about airplane security, so there is a quite high barrier in the field, but its one of those great security vectors Pen Test Partners specialise in well. Not only are Ken and Alex security experts but they can pilot aircraft too! So a great talk to go and see.

Ken and Alex's talk was really good and gave me a bit more of an insight into an area I know little about.

I must admit though having skipped dinner the previous night and breakfast that morning, plus the heat, I was starting to get somewhat fatigued and needed some food to boost my energy levels.

Thinking of home I headed off to check out Gordon Ramsey's Fish & Chips to get a little taste of home with a Las Vegas twist. Loved it, check out my review here.

After my spot of lunch, in the afternoon, I caught another Pen Test Partner's talk called "Reverse-Engineering 4g Hotspots for Fun, Bugs and Net Financial Loss", which although a lot of it went over my head I still found it a fascinating and insightful talk.

Also that afternoon I caught another Pen Test Partner's talk by Christoper Wade called "Tag-side attacks against NFC" in which he covered tag-side attacks against NFC communication protocols, including cracking of Mifare encryption keys and performing targeted attacks against NFC readers. Fascinating stuff and the talk also included a sonic screwdriver! Great talk! and loved the Doctor Who sonic screwdriver with a twist!

Getting tired I decided to finish the day in the Social Engineering Village and firstly caught a talk by Chris Kirsch about a Cold reading experiment he did to make people believe he had psychic powers. In the talk, he did an introduction to the concept of cold reading, and then deep-dived into his experiments, and explained how to use cold reading techniques in social engineering.

Next up I saw Rebecca Long's talk "Hacking Your Career Through Social Engineering". Rebecca is a software engineer with 15 years experience focusing on QA and DevOps. In the talk, Rebecca explained how you can use Social Engineering skills to aid in your career to help you be successful.

That final talk took me to 5.30pm and pretty much ready to drop!

So I headed back to Caesars Hotel and set the alarm for two hours sleeping before joining the rest of the Pen Test Partners crew at 8pm for a meal at Joe's Seafood Shack, and what a knockout meal it was too.

By Sunday morning I was all but done in. There was a handful of talks left running but I was ready to go home. I certainly wasn't looking forward to a long day and wait for a flight and the 9 hour flight home, plus 2.5 hours driving but as far as Defcon was concerned, I was finished.

So I headed off to find the largest breakfast I could find to fill me up for the next 30 hours - yes 30 hours awake to get home to the UK !! - and found it at Hash House a go-go and a massive meatloaf breakfast. Believe me, in real life, it was a lot bigger than this picture looks. I basically didn't even finish it and I always finish breakfast, so it was big!!

So many other adventures occurred on this trip and so many talks I wished I'd made but there wasn't enough time or schedules clashed. I did, however, see some great talks and got to talk to some great people and got a bit more insight into this sector, and the brilliant work that Pen Test Partners do across multiple security vectors.

As for the event, it was brilliant.

With talks covering AI, App Security, Aviation, Blockchain, Bio Hacking, Car Hacking, Crypto and Privacy, Data, Ethics, Internet of Things, Maritime, Social Engineering and so much more....there was certainly a heck of a lot of things to see and listen to whatever your interest area.

What a fantastic conference and in a fantastic location. Just bloody hot!

P.S and did I have a gamble whilst I was in Las Vegas? yes perhaps.

Here are my winnings.

Viva Las vegas ????