Defcon Roundup

Last week in Las Vegas, NV Defcon was in full swing bringing with it new world records, creative hacks, and a shameful wall of sheep for those foolish enough to use unencrypted methods to talk to their servers back at home. PT from MAKE has a couple of great entries in their blog covering his experiences there. After seeing these and other posts from the event Gear Live is going to have to head down to Defcon next year and do some reporting first hand. Check out more information after the jump.

Possibly most impressive is a new world record for unamplified WiFi signal distance. Team PAD took the prize by using two standard WiFi PC cards each hooked up to a large satellite dish (one 12’, the other 10’). The signal reached more than 125 miles and the team was able to get 12ms ping times, create a SSH connection, and use VNC to view a remote desktop.

Read More | Team PAD World Record via MAKE

Some folks from Flexilis were on hand to demonstrate the RFID readers they had put together. The readers had strong amplifiers and massive antennas. They were able to read RFID tags from nearly 70’ - a frightening thought as our society moves closer and closer to using RFID tags for e-commerce, identification, and corporate security while relying on the short range of most RFID chips.

Read More | Long Distance RFID Reader

Finally when you go to a convention like Defcon you should really take steps to prevent yourself from being hacked. The wireless internet access being provided by the conference was of course monitored and every single packet was sniffed. Anyone foolish enough to submit a non SSL encrypted form, or try to check their email without using some form of encryption would then discover to their horror that their login, server, and the first part of their password was being broadcast to the WALL OF SHEEP! Come on people - wake up and stop transmitting your passwords in plain text - in this day and age it’s just asking to be hacked.

Read More | WALL OF SHEEP