AusCERT 2012 pics: Vaders and Terminators
The 2012 AusCERT conference continues with Star Wars, censorship, cyber attacks and machines becoming self-aware.
(Credit: Zennith Geisler/ZDNet Australia)
Chairman and founder of Internet Systems Consortium Paul Vixie gave his keynote address on "Stories and Lessons from DNSChanger", a trojan that reroutes victims' traffic through rogue servers, without their knowledge. Despite the victim count decreasing, Vixie couldn't help but cringe as he presented the figures.
(Credit: Zennith Geisler/ZDNet Australia)
Mark Fabro, president and chief security scientist for Lofty Perch, tried not to look too concerned when there was a mishap with the stage lighting during his plenary presentation on "Forensics and supervisory control and data acquisition [SCADA]/distributed control system [DCS]".
"You know, everybody laughs when I kid about hitting critical mass and the system becoming self-aware ... this is it, this is the moment."
(Credit: Zennith Geisler/ZDNet Australia)
Day two speaker Mark Fabro spoke to AusCERT general manger Graham Ingram and conference manager Claire Groves.
(Credit: Michael Lee/ZDNet Australia)
Peter Gutmann, researcher at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland, took to the stage to discuss contactless payment systems; namely, credit cards and near-field communication (NFC) phones.
(Credit: Michael Lee/ZDNet Australia)
US Army Cyber Command operational attorney Robert Clark spoke about the legal aspects of cyberspace operations, claiming never to have seen a cyber attack.
"With all due respect to all my friends out here, doing this; we've never seen a cyber attack, because I'm looking at a very specific definition of what a cyber attack is.
"Stuxnet was not a cyber attack. Estonia, nope. Georgia, nope."
(Credit: Zennith Geisler/ZDNet Australia)
Queensland Police detective superintendent Brian Hay's session, "Mythbusters II", continued on from his presentation last year, where he spoke about online fraud and corporate crime — this year, he mostly showed the audience funny videos and hoax internet photos, such as the Derbyshire fairy and bonsai cats.
(Credit: Zennith Geisler/ZDNet Australia)
There was a bit of controversy on day one, when Webroot referenced competitor Symantec on its booth signage, and we were a bit surprised that the sign stayed up. However, it turns out, it only lasted 24 hours before they were censored.
(Credit: Zennith Geisler/ZDNet Australia)
Attendees could pretend to be Luke, Leia or Han Solo, thanks to the life-sized Star Wars cut-out at the AusCERT booth. But why can't we pretend to be Darth Vader?
(Credit: Zennith Geisler/ZDNet Australia)
The Terminator 3 pinball machine has proved to be quite popular so far, with players recording their top scores the low-fi way — with a pen and paper.
(Credit: Zennith Geisler/ZDNet Australia)
Munir Kotadia opted to report from the top of the Hacklabs tank, possibly to avoid confrontations with those he was talking about ... or maybe he was just trying to get a better mobile phone signal?