World-famous German hacker group member to speak in Melbourne
Koening's exact role within the group is not known, but he will be the last speaker of the day at the conference next week, following a lineup of security professionals from some of Australia's largest IT organisations: Netstar Australia, Dimension Data, Deloitte and The Sysadmin Group. The German hacker will speak on "Urban Hacking, Hacktavism & Culture Jamming" in a talk that promises to be popular. According to his site, twenty-something Koening is in "this huge country on the other side of the world" on a working holiday and says that "the people are amazing and the nature and wildlife is awesome".
The Chaos Computer Club was formed in Berlin back in 1981 and became world-famous in the 1980s when it managed to hack a key German computer network, forcing a bank in Hamburg to debit a large sum of money in an online account. The money was returned the next day in front of the press.
The group celebrated its 20th birthday (which is probably some kind of record for a computer club) by 'enhancing' the famous Berlin building Haus des Lehrers (house of the teacher) with software that turned its office lights into a giant computer screen, allowing passing motorists to play the classic arcade game Pong with their mobile phones on the building-sized screen.
The aptly-named SecureCon, which is in its third consecutive year, originally started as an internal Melbourne University-only conference. Its initial success led it to grow to a larger size relatively quickly, with many attendees coming from other universities and from within the private sector.
The sessions on Thursday the 10th will focus upon the provision of workshops introducing participants to common hacking and exploit and vulnerability scanning tools. Instructors will show participants how to productively utilise such tools to audit their own networks for potential security risks. But it's not all about hitting the school books for attendees - the workshop will conclude with a 'hackathon' where participants will actually get their feet wet hacking a set of computers pre-loaded with secret tokens. On the Friday the conference will move to a lecture format with presentations and speeches from the aforementioned organisations running all day.