Moderating the l0pht panel
I got to be moderator of the l0pht reunion panel at Source Boston, a new security conference here in town.
(from the Source Boston site)
It was a blast. Aptly, we brought in beers (except me. I drank a shirley temple. and Sili — he had ginger ale).
Six of the eight made it:
Here they are, L. to R. in the photo, by handle, and how they picked it:
Weld Pond: he needed a handle to get on The Works, a bulletin board system, and pointed his finger at a map of boston. It hit Weld Pond, which he still hasn’t seen in person.
John Tan – John Tan safe co. makes the safes used to house the crown jewels
Mudge (who likes to tell people it’s his middle name, but in fact there was a guy he didn’t like and he picked it figuring if he got in trouble, the cops would go after tht guy first)
Space Rogue – was free associating to get a handle for The Works. He did not realize there awas a video game by the same name. (here’s his blog post on the conference)
Silicosis – had used it in a short story in 4th grade and thought it sounded cool. He didn’t realize it was the proper name for black lung disesase.
Dildog – He liked that it was the original name for Dogbert. It did not occur to him that if he took off a letter, it was ripe for abuse.
The last question: What scares the hell out of them?
- Certified pre-0wned digital picture frames and other digital memorabilia.
- embedded systems
- Virtualization
UPDATE: here’s Chris Wysopal’s (weld pond’s) post on pre0wning from the veracode blog
http://www.veracode.com/blog/?p=82#comment-882
What scares the hell out of me:
That mudge thinks they could take the internet down in 2.5 to 3 hours, instead of 30 minutes. And that it doesn’t go down because the bad guys need it to stay up, so they can do their thing.
Innismir tweeted the panel.
Focal Intent’s Flicker photos of the panel.
thanks for your post. I don’t read French well at all, but I used babelfish to get a reasonable sense of what you were saying. I, too, was struck by Mudge’s comment on the Internet. and i’m glad you liked the panel.
Michael
I am pleased you took the time to have translated. My english is so bad I stopped writing conference wrapups in english…
Mudge comment was great. I mean people don’t realize how easy it can be to crash a huge part of the Internet down. And actually pointing out that all we could save to that regards in 10 years is only 2 hours is a valuable lesson.
And it also meet Dan Geer’s observations when he said it was only by luck we did not have a major breakdown up to now, illustrating it with the potential impact of a 911 worm.
Well, just few thoughts. Anyway, panel was great, I really enjoyed it. And I would like to thank you.