Estimates are about 8,000 people showed up for Defcon 17. The Riviera corridors were gridlocked at times – foreboding for next year.
Everybody was carrying a netbook, often with 500 mA USB wifi cards and 12″ external antenna. I can’t believe how many people had powered-on iPhones and Windows notebooks in a “hostile network environment.”
Some favorite talks were:
- Metaphish (Spearphishing with Metasploit, PDFs and Tor) – blended attacks are the future.
- Passwords – remarkable what a student can do with a couple home PCs and a little time. The recent FOSS dev sites disclosures provide lots of data to analyze.
- Clobbering the Cloud – lots of low-hanging fruit in cloud services.
