Holding out hope that perhaps a public service announcement has gone out to civilians in the hotel warning them about the various potential threats in the air, I approach the desk labeled "Security" for clarification. I take another uneasy glance around the casino floor and while I may not be Batman, now I feel like I'm in Gotham City: All these nameless tourists, strangers, bystanders, each of them ignorant of the cyber threats potentially looming amidst the palm trees. (The National Cyber Security Alliance warns of "identity theft, financial fraud, stalking, bullying, hacking, e-mail spoofing, information piracy and forgery, intellectual property crime, and more.") Should I, like, do something? How the NBC Russian Hack Actually Happened Getting hacked doesn't carry much upside. There is a chance, however unlikely, that one of them is going to go home rich. (After an embarrassing night at a roulette table, I can personally attest to this fact.) Still, visitors to Vegas have made some kind of calculated risk. Of course, people who vacation in Vegas aren't exactly protecting themselves from being hacked the old-fashioned way, by the croupier or the one-armed bandit. One of the cohort, I'm informed, had already received a text from her husband that contained a link with a virus.Īlso, do not use any of the hotel's ATMs. Don't open any links in text messages, even if they come from people you know. He and his friends also add some pointers to the advice I've already received: don't send any text messages you don't want someone to read. And I'm going to go ahead and guess that their wifi is also on.Ī security vendor I meet in the line for badges answers my question fairly succinctly. The other guests at the hotel? "They're collateral damage." The lovebirds at the bar are on Facetime, so clearly they haven't turned off their apps and cellular data. The teetering bros on a bachelor weekend could only be the most undercover of undercover Feds. The elderly Chinese woman wearing slippers in the elevator mirror is probably not an information security engineer. It's also catering to other guests besides those who are in town for Defcon and the other giant hacker conference that immediately preceded it, Black Hat.įorget Car Hacking: At Defon 2014, Phone Calls and Web Bots Are the True Security Threat The Rio is a giant luxury hotel and casino with four pools, three whirlpools, two bars, and a seemingly endlessly mirrored poker and blackjack and roulette tables. I think.īut I wonder about the other people, the innocents. It doesn't know me now. It's just a piece of metal. The only internet I access (for reading up on the Russian Billion-Password Hack, for instance, or how not to get hacked at Defcon) is the plug-in Ethernet from the secure press room. I know it's just psychological, but it actually feels lighter in my hand, like a corpse that's lost the apocryphal 21 grams of the human soul. That eliminates the temptation to check any of my password-protected apps, since I can't access the Internet anymore. My phone isn't a smart phone anymore. I change the settings on my phone so that wifi, Bluetooth and cellular data are all turned off. There’s even a hacker version of “Capture the Flag.” Computers will be set up on an internal network, and the winner will be the one who’s able to break into the most machines.So I do what I can: I turn off the wifi on my computer before I arrive at the hotel. But the hotel seems to know how to please them: “They ordered all of these cases of Jolt Cola, and started keeping the food area open almost 24 hours,” she said.ĭefcon’s founder, who calls himself Dark Tangent, remembers a past convention where the party got out of hand and a hacker and a hanger-on were caught on a security camera having sex in an elevator. One of them, Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Money, gave the federal perspective to a packed auditorium this morning.Īt the “Defcon Shoot” this morning, trigger-happy hackers went target shooting with guns out in the desert.Defconners will also attend a formal ball this weekend, dancing to electronic, house and trance music.ĭefcon has gotten kicked out of several hotels for hacker misbehavior before finding a home at the Alexis Park, said Jennifer Grannick, a “hacker lawyer” who has attended the past five conventions. “This place is crawling with feds,” said Dean Turner of. The most buttoned-down attendees - federal agents - will be getting “I Am The Fed” T-shirts as part of a “spot the fed” contest, where hackers try to flush out undercover police. One buttoned-down, 50-something information systems manager from Montreal, who declined to give his name (Defcon attendees are often sticklers for privacy), said with a smile that guys like him were “ruining the con” for the hard-core audience who have been there since the first Defcon in 1993.
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