The Twitter phenomenon has finally reached AusCERT in some force with the number of people posting tweets growing as the day progressed. For those of us not in attendance, it was a good way to get some of the latest news, (like the almost instantaneous reports that Senator Conroy was not going to talk about the Internet Censorship plan). As the day went on, the Twitter postings became more and more interesting, wrapping up well into the early morning with people talking about a variety of things including once again, local content and male vs female speaker numbers. Follow the Twitter postings here: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23auscert

So, did AusCERT 2009 – Day 1 follow Conroy’s lead and be a dud? Click on…..

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The Knuckle reports that AusCERT Day 1 was a winner:

Wow! In contrast to previous ho-hum AusCERTs of past years, this year’s AusCERT has kicked off with a loud bang and is really shaping up to be the best one yet. And that’s despite the conference opening by an unremarkable Senator Stephen Conroy, who regurgitated the Rudd-mantra of “nation-building”, whatever that means. More about him later.

The two keynote speakers, Dan Klein & Paul Twomey both came out swinging with hard-hitting & humorous presentations getting right to the guts of the issues we face today.

Paul Twomey, CEO of ICANN (and a very impressive Aussie ex-pat), spoke of the very serious threat posed by the corruption of the DNS. In terms of who controls the Internet now and into the future, Twomey pressed home his belief that we cannot afford to put the Internet at risk by more forms of Government security and controls. (I wonder if Senator Conroy was listening? Stupid question. We know he wasn’t).

Twomey favoured a public-health-styled approach to the overall control/maintenance of the Internet. In other words, a variety of entities are given various roles to do their “bit”. Twomey also spoke of the rise of government espionage on the Internet and stressed that his organisation is not that of Internet policeman…..just in case anyone was wondering.

Dan Klein. What a colourful character he is. If Dan hadn’t taken up a career in IT, he could have very easily slipped into the world of stand-up comedy. (I mean that in a nice way. I suppose you need some humour to exist for so long in the world of IT security and be successful). Dan used the parallels between the worlds of architecture – real buildings\infrastructure and the infrastructure of the Internet…the parallel being today’s complex & confused Internet architecture and it‘s associated problems of complexity.

In Klein’s opinion, the only way to solve today’s Internet problems is to completely start again. He added; “We to design security to account for the topography of the idiot user. We are attacking the fever, not the swamp”. For those who place his Internet razor-gang theory into the too-hard basket, he gave examples, such as the implementation of the London sewers, the Sydney Harbour bridge and others. Klien believes this can really happen, and given his enthusiasm and charisma, he also had me convinced. ?

In contrast to Klein & Twomey, Senator Conroy was a waste of time. Did we suspect it would be otherwise? Conroy spoke about the National Broadband Network (NBN), and stated; “Enhancement of Australia’s E-security is one of the Government’s top ten priorities”. He also spoke about the Stay-Smart website (is he kidding himself?) and it’s key importance to assisting users in protecting themselves online. He thanked AusCERT for providing this. Alas, his message was confused and lacked direction. See recent Beast or Buddha posts for exacts reasons why!

Other great speakers included Det. Dan Antonio, (WA Police), who gave a very interesting case study about an investigation into a SQL Injection upon an Australian Hotel booking site and Andrew Rourke, (Datacom) who spoke about the evolution of mobile phone forensics and its application in terrorism investigations. More tomorrow!

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Pete’s Report:

Pleasantly surprised…today was not a write-off. Two reasons why today could have been a write off for your average AusCERT punter:
1) You went out large on the first night and didn’t make it out of bed
2) AusCERT organisers didn’t listen to last years feedback and again offer up drivel.

Luckily neither happened. The keynotes were up to par, Dan Klein was interesting as always….however Dan, you’re not being controversial enough if that was your primary aim! Now this isn’t aimed at Dan but maybe Infosec has run out of ideas!? No really new concepts/ideas have come out of our industry since the beginning of the decade and, of the old concepts out there, we still do them badly. We still have great security researchers but breaking things isn’t really new. Back to AC, the premise of Dan’s presentation was an analogy to Frank L. Wright’s quote regarding Philadelphia when the town fathers asked what they could do with the city… “Raze it and start over”. Unfortunately it didn’t happen in the analogy and it wont happen for information security!

After sprinkling past years with cybercrime presentations, this year one of the streams could have been renamed “Online Crime’ stream. Dan Antonio had a very interesting case study into a person that allegedly circumvented the security controls of an online hotel booking system and then proceeded to e-mail 4600 clients their CC details. Lesson 1 kids, get permission first! Next was the ever entertaining Scott McIntyre. His presentation last year was good and he lived up to expectations again. (Note to AusCERT; keep buying him local wine if that’s what you have to do… just keep people like this coming back).  Scott discussed fraud in the world of VoIP and how a simple construct in the telephony world becomes that much easier to perpetrate and harder to defend against when you put it on the Internet.

The last session I saw was a talk about the Russian DDoS scene. Good presentation despite the fact that one of the two guys presenting was translating for the other. They lost their way at the end due to technical difficulties but the main thing I got out of the presentation was the ease and specialisation of criminal services now. Pick and choose a spam, DDoS, fraud service to get the outcome you want. Thank the economists for capitalism…even the criminals are letting the market sort it out.

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Follow @Big_Galoot on Twitter and his AusCERT photo show here:
http://s469.photobucket.com/albums/rr55/big_galoot/auscert%2009/

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This early morning edition of the AusCERT roundup was brought to you by Penetration Testing. Posted post Keynote Day 2 start to avoid potential issues like in 2008.