New Use Cases for Bitcoin

Mika/ May 30, 2014/ Security, Stories

Although I’m new in the Bitcoin world I had a quite promising start. Earlier this month I was able to visit the Bitcoin Conference in Amsterdam and had some very good conversations with core developers from the Bitcoin Foundation and to my honor also the chance to talk to Gavin Andreesen, long-time lead developer and now chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation. At DeepSec our first contact with Bitcoin was in 2012 when John Matonis, now Executive Director and Board Member of the Bitcoin Foundation, talked about the evolution of e-Money.  But since then we hadn’t intense contact. Tomorrow I will visit the Bitcoin Expo in Vienna and hope to meet new people in the community and discuss the latest trends and developments. The fascinating thing about Bitcoin and the global block-chain is the

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IT Security without Borders

René Pfeiffer/ May 27, 2014/ Discussion, Internet

U.S. government officials are considering to prevent Chinese nationals from attending hacking and IT security conferences by denying visas. The ideas is „to curb Chinese cyber espionage“. While this initiative has been widely criticised and the measure is very easy to circumvent, it doesn’t come as a surprise. Recent years have shown that hacking has become more and more political. This aspect was already explored in the keynote of DeepSec 2012. So what is the real problem? Espionage, be it „cyber“ or not, revolves around information. This is exactly why we have a problem with the word „cyber“. Methods of transporting information have been around for a long time. Guglielmo Marconi and Heinrich Hertz raised problems for information security long before the Internet did. The only difference is the ease of setting up Internet

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DeepSec 2014 “The Power of Knowledge” – Call for Papers

René Pfeiffer/ May 5, 2014/ Call for Papers

After a couple of months tinkering behind the scenes we can finally open our Call for Papers for DeepSec 2014! The upcoming DeepSec 2014 will be in November at our well-known conference hotel. We accept submissions as of now, and we are keen to hear your ideas. To give you some thoughts on what we are looking for: DeepSec 2014 is all about the Power of Knowledge! The past years have shown that knowledge is a true „cyber“ weapon. Everyone recalling the endless discussions about full/responsible/no/delayed disclosure of bugs affecting the security of IT systems can relate to the power of knowledge. Other might not be so lucky and grasp what knowledge means when turned into exploits and compromised systems. This is why we want your contribution to DeepSec 2014 centred around knowledge. Let’s

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BSidesLondon 2014 Rookie Track Videos

René Pfeiffer/ May 3, 2014/ Conference

We are back from the BSidesLondon 2014, and we had a great time. It was good to meet everyone to get some new ideas and to work on old ideas too. The Rookie Track was a success. We had a hard time deciding which talk was best. We managed to find a winner which will be invited to attend DeepSec 2014. Congratulations to Georgi Boiko! The Rookie Track recordings will be published online depending on the choice of the speaker. Some are already online. Here is a list of talks you can already watch. More are being published in the coming weeks (we will update this list). A Look at Modern Warfare by @kaitlyn4495 The Joy of Passwords by Joseph Gwynne-Jones RFID Hacking – An Introduction by @d3sre Run-time tools to aid application security

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