Shmoocon Submission and Current Events
Posted in projects on December 21st, 2011 by g3kSo it’s been a while since I’ve had a serious update to the blog.
Some of the things I’m working on I can’t quite talk about (work related), but I can go over some of the stuff I’m trying to accomplish.
Passwords: A conversation I had with @biosshadow on Twitter lead me to have a series of conversations with him regarding something I’d like to work on, but currently can’t afford to. I have a lot of research to do with enacting it, but I’d like to start a commercial password cracking tool. The cost is currently very high. Bitcoin miners are taking over a lot of the really good hardware since it’s similar work involved. I’m hoping with the recent crashes of the BTC market, I’ll eventually be able to nab a few mining rigs or good Radeon cards. He’s started a similar project that I’ve outlined in the post below this one and we’re going to be working together on it. (working on details soonish)
I submitted a talk to Shmoocon about social engineering, it got rejected, but it makes me realize that I CAN and should submit talks to conferences. I had what I thought was a good topic (and a few people agreed with me): What the SE community can learn from pickup artists. If you are not familiar at all with pickup artistry, but you are familiar with social engineering, I encourage you to check it out. I’m going to outline it in a post sometime this week as I get more time, but the tl;dr is that pickup artists use their brand of social engineering to get laid. It’s more complicated than that and I will readily admit that I dove into that world for a while, but not for the reasons it’s regularly associated with. For one, it’s a confidence builder. Most people that know me or have known me are aware of the fact that I have had very little self confidence socially. Following exercises from this community, I’ve built up my self-confidence and have mostly eliminated my previous social anxiety. This all happened in less than a year. The goal of this talk is to highlight their community and support efforts, showcasing how quickly one can learn SE techniques from actively using pickup artist techniques. If you are familiar with the Star Wars universe at all, I was going to title it “The Dark Side of Social Engineering” based on the lore of the universe (quick path to power, etc), but expecting readers to pick that portion up from the title instead of seeing “The Evil Side of Social Engineering” is too much. I’m pretty nerdy.
The point of all that is that I’m planning on submitting this and possibly other talks in the future. It’s easier than it seems and it also seems like I have cool things to talk about, where previously I didn’t think I did.
If you have feedback on my talk idea, I’d love to hear it, drop a line in the comments or g3k AT disillusion dot us