Hackers kicked out of hacking conference for hacking
Three French reporters were kicked out of the Black Hat Security Conference after hacking its "secure" wireless network, ostensibly to demonstrate the need for reporters to surf more securely. From Wired's Danger Room:
A Black Hat spokeswoman explained that the three reporters gathered log-in data for reporters in the Black Hat press room and tried to convince organizers of the Wall of Sheep to post the data publicly. The Wall of Sheep is a traditional feature at the DefCon hacker conference (which begins tomorrow in Las Vegas) but was launched at Black Hat for the first time this year.The Wall of Sheep is designed to shame conference attendees who don't connect to the internet using secure methods.
This is like the 1984 conference of the All England Lawn Bowling Association in Worthing, U.K., where insouciant young rising star John Mills, 68, dared to demonstrate the effects of retrograde topspin on peaty lawns shortly after light rainfall. The controversy lasted for years and ultimately led to the placement of heavy artillery, armed with silver iodide cloud-seeding shells, at all major stops on the international lawn bowling circuit.
French Reporters at Black Hat Booted from Conference for Hacking Fellow Reporters [Danger Room]
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Now *that's* ironic!
Uh, sorry. You lost me at lawn bowling.
They didn't hack the wireless network, which is famously anything-goes at Black Hat. They hacked the entirely separate wired network, which exists so that reporters can get their work done. No doubt lots of insecure stuff gets connected to the wired network, but this is not news. Reporters are not Black Hat "combatants", and are not going to report on Black Hat if their laptops get oWnZ0r3d as soon as they try to submit a story.
This is sort of like someone at a martial-arts conference kicking a reporter in the head and then saying "What? People are doing the same thing in the ring right now!"