How not to get pwned at Defcon

[dninja at gmail.com (Robin Wood)]

2009/7/14 Nicholas B. <nberthaume at gmail.com>:
> I an entirely read-only approach when on-site heres how I plan on
> approaching it:
>
> On my laptop if:
> Disable hard drives in bios, change bootorder to optical media first
> and only, set bios password, use my choice of live cd, disable
> wireless and tether to my evdo adaptor via usb.
>
> When accessing anything external from the laptop:
> SSH out via public key with key from a thumb-drive that's set to read
> only and has a pass-phrase protected key and tunnel to a trusted box
> only with a pre-accepted and verified host key from the thumb drive.

So after going to all this trouble, what are you going to actually use
your laptop for? If you are disabling any mass storage then you can't
download stuff so you are limited to browsing and reading mail, both
of which I'd guess you can do on your evdo phone.

I'd like to know how many people start with these good intentions then
realise there is something they need from the hdd so mount it up then
just leave it on.

Robin