Hackers To Turn Up in KL

Over 20 of the world's renowned hackers from around the globe will be congregating here for the third Annual HITBSecConf2004 this Oct 4-7.

Hack In The Box (M) Sdn Bhd, the organiser of Malaysia's first non-profit home-grown hacking and network security conference, said participants would include from Europe, UK, US, Canada, Australia and the Asia Pacific region.

Building on the success of the last two conferences, this year's event has been extended to cover a period of four days, with a two-day hands-on technical training session, followed by the conference proper on Oct 6 and Oct 7.

This year's event will also feature two very prominent keynote speakers, Theo De Raadt and John T. Draper (a.k.a Captain Crunch).

De Raadt, who will be presenting a paper entitled "Exploit Mitigation Techniques", has been involved with free UNIX operating systems since 1990, and later became one of the founders and prime developers of NetBSD.

Draper, one of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club, meanwhile has over 30 years of programming and security expertise.

Widely known as the first security pioneer, Draper is credited with introducing, among others, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs to the computing world, and a generation of hackers to the glorious concept of "phone phreaking", spawning the worldwide "2600" clubs.

"People need to be aware of important security issues which change on a daily basis," said Draper, commenting on the importance of events like HITBSecConf in the statement issued by the organiser here today.

"Our network infrastructure is very weak to all sorts of outside attacks. Al Qaeda already knows this and are constantly probing systems looking for weaknesses."

"Spam is a very big issue, because it offers huge financial incentives for the creation of viruses, Trojans and other tools used to spread spam. This technology leaks over to other more insidious issues like large scale DDOS attacks, dictionary attacks etc.

"This results in a huge supply of infected hosts used by spammers and spam gangs which control more then a million PC's all of which can be used for large coordinated attacks on our networks," added Draper.

"These Trojans have to be identified and shut down and spam mail is the key because we use spam as a means of identifying these infected hosts so we can point them out to the network administrators so they can shut them down," he said.

As with last year's conference, attendees will be guaranteed a look at some of the latest attack and defence methods including new and previously unpublished exploits, said Dhillon Andrew Kannabhiran, founder and chief executive officer for Hack In The Box.

"This is truly a golden opportunity for the local network security vendors as well as members of the computer industry to come forward and gain first hand knowledge on the latest threats and attacks facing organisations as well as individuals and how best to deal with them," he said.