'We have your water supply, and printers' - Brumcon report

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/33479.html

By Our special correspondent
Posted: 20/10/2003 

Brumcon this year was held at the Brittania hotel in Birmingham, the
agenda was as varied as one can expect when h4xors, Phreeks, geeks and
assorted wannabes get together to discuss the interweb thing and how
abusing computers is more phun than abusing yourself, writes Arthur
Barnes.

The whole thing kicked off with a demonstration of phone tapping,
there was of course a lab set up at the Brittania so no animals were
harmed during the course of the film and no laws were broken. The
demonstration included a variety of tips, hints and tricks for the
amateur interceptor.

After a beer break, we gathered together to discuss the merits of
various encrypted file systems under Linux. The consensus reached was
that the free stuff was difficult to use and we should all go down the
Stego route if we were going to keep "the man" away from our porn,
mp3s and tools.

Things started to get a little more interesting when semi sober we
reconvened to investigate the security surrounding the UKs water
management system. The talk was titled "how safe is a glass of water?"  
It was a detailed breakdown of the RF systems that are used by water
management authorities in the UK and how these systems can be abused,
interfered with and generally messed.

The live demonstration included how to monitor the un-encrypted water
management systems and create a denial of service attack. It was also
made clear that additional communication channels using dial up
connections would kick in automatically in the event of such an
attack.

Moving on Alex Delarge gave an amusing and informative presentation
around more traditional h4xor themes. This included the unveiling of a
tool that if released out to the wider community would cause hilarity
and consternation in equal amounts ? more on that later.

The first component of Al's discussion focused on Cisco's access
control system and offered those present a detailed "how to" on
defeating this product. The methodology outlined used a privilege
escalation on the current version, but the older version of Cisco's
product used a simple obvious compromise that showed a remarkable lack
of consideration for security by the global leader in networking tin.

We moved on to a demonstration of HP printer security (or lack
thereof). There are of course already tools in the public domain that
take advantage of known vulns in the PJL implementation but Al has
written a tool that takes these already understood issues to the next
level. The tool allows a user to lock users out of the printer's
console and set the default number of prints to 999 ? so far so dull,
but unlike other tools that enable an unscrupulous user to perform
this action on a printer by printer basis, this innovation allows the
hacker to take control of all the printers in an organisation at once.

Al then moved on to the eeyes secure IIS product; the content of this
session is largely unrepeatable due the libel laws and limitations on
the use of profanity, but to sum up, "Secure IIS is not a significant
barrier to the activities of those individuals with an enquiring mind
and the skill to investigate the content of a webserver"

Al then interviewed a member of the London 2600 on recent legal
difficulties; this led to a free flowing discussion on the CMU and its
validity as a piece of legislation.

Dr K then gave an informative talk entitled "Fuck computers lets
hack", which was an analysis of the methods utilised by hackers, and
how these methods might be employed in a non-technological environment
(politics, religion and science).

In summary a pretty good con, some of the stuff I haven?t covered
includes the panel at the end of the day and the great giveaways.



-
ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org

To unsubscribe email majordomo () attrition org with 'unsubscribe isn'
in the BODY of the mail.