NOTE FROM CLEMENT:
First of all I would like to say KUDO to my friend Anthony Ruso (anthony@ruso.ca) who has written a great article on the RECON conference that has just taken place in Montreal.  It was the first time this year and I am sure people will be impatiently waiting for next year event.  I would have liked to participate myself but was schedule for a class in Africa.  At the last minute the class was cancelled and I ended up being hopitalized for surgery on my kidney.  I am glad Anthony was able to act as our eyes and ears out there.  See his article and do look at the link provided, there are some great links below:

Recon Rant 2005

 

For those who don’t know or didn’t get a chance to attend, the first ever RECON Computer Security Conference took place this weekend in Montreal, Quebec. Actually, as I write this article the 3-day “Tools and Techniques used by Reverse Engineers� training by Nicolas Brulez, is still going on but the weekend conference filled with exceptional speakers is now behind us. 

I don’t know about other InfoSec people but I’m not afraid to admit that sometimes, just having to deal with the everyday politics of the corporate world and the “JOB� aspect of being an InfoSec Professional can put me in a little rut. It’s ok, you can admit it too, as fab as it is to be Security Testers we do sometimes have those day/weeks/months where we are in doing a “JOB� and lose touch and motivation for the stuff we love. Call it, hacking, call it cracking, call it reverse engineering … whatever you want to call it we love it and “cons� are just the thing we need to kick us in the ASS and get us out of that utterly unmotivated state of mind and back on track to doing what we love, breaking stuff, DAMN-IT !!!

 

Ok enough babbling and more about what took place this weekend. The venue rocked!!! The Crowne Plaza hotel staff was exceptional and judging by the half asleep faces after every lunch break, the hotel food was way above par. Also, the, Recon crew, comprised of Hugo, Mathieu and Guillaume and a handful of volunteers like myself looking for CPE credits and a free conference, did a great job assembling  and disassembling everything in the conference room as well as keeping all behind-the-scene technical aspects working flawlessly. Regardless of our efforts this was a “hacker� con and as expected spoofed access points started popping up shortly after the conference began. By the first lunch break, Hugo had to remind everyone that this was indeed a hacker convention and if you were dumb enough to send unencrypted passwords across the wifi network, as some were, you should change them ASAP at once…pfffff…..kids…. Besides the wifi incident and the expected nmap scans and tcpdump sniffs going on constantly, things went pretty smooth.

 

As for the speakers you will be able to download the speaker presentations and videos off the recon.cx site really soon, at which point you will be able to form your own opinions on the topics that interest you. From a Security-Tester point of view, which veered away a little from the “Reverse Engineering� theme of REcon 2005, I enjoyed some speakers more than others and that’s just because I can’t really form an opinion on a topic I know little about. That being said, the most exciting talk for me was the presentation by Robert E. Lee and Jack Louis. Robert teased all of us with the first public demonstration of the Cruiser web application testing tool, which he will be releasing to the open source community in a couple of days. Cruiser will take testing web applications to a whole new level, competing with the likes of SPI Dynamics and Watchfire only free….sweet… Not only did he demo the functionality of Cruiser but he ran it against his production mail server and …. Well you’ll have to wait for the video to see what happened there. Along with Cruiser, Robert and Jack, talk about Unicorn Scan which he plans to use with a 20 node cluster in an attempt to scan (port 80 HTTP) every IP address on the internet in 24hours. He’s still looking for people to volunteer some true bandwidth for this project, so if you can help, please contact Robert Lee through the Dyad Security website. Robert also took the time to add some of Haroon Meer’s presentation to his talk. Haroon schedule to present his talk titled “Web Application Hacking� attended the conference but  was not able to speak due to an illness.

 

Also extremely entertaining was the presentation by Fravia, who’s full presentation titled “Wizard searching: reversing the commercial web for fun and knowledge� is already available on his website (see link below). Fravia presentation at times seemed like a comedy show, this guy just rocks…can wait to see him speak again. Most of the crowd just loved his “no worries� attitude along with his presentation on getting the most out of your search engine results, complete with effective p0rn and music searching examples…. Go through his whole presentation using the link below.

 

Other notable appearances and talks include Metasploit’s Spoonm and his talk on “Recent Shellcode Developments� as well as Cedric Blancher’s talk on “Attacking Wifi with Traffic Injection� Cedric all the way from Paris, France released a proof of concept tool for communication over Wifi networks using traffic injection. As mentioned in his talk he wrote the tool to prove he could bypass Cisco’s PSPF. The tool and presentation are available on his site as well. (See link below).

 

In concluding I just want to say thanks to the REcon team for the opportunity to participate in this event. Great Job and I’m sure REcon 2006 will be even better See you all at Defcon!!

 

Anthony Ruso CISSP, CISM, CEH, CCSE, CSSA, MCSE

Sr. Information Security Consultant

 

LINKS

 

Cruiser Demo coming soon here.....

 

Fravia

Wizard searching: reversing the commercial web for fun and knowledge

 

Cedric Blancher – Presentation and POC Tool