The Beer Farmers have new members and hit DTX London! I give my first in-person talk along with many others!
Four pints in
Things are starting to fully open up around the world in the post-pandemic world we now live in and London is no exception. DTX – Digital Transformation Expo London is an interesting conference. Taking up a few areas of Excel Centre in Greenwich it is a concoction of vendor stalls, good talks, some inspiring keynotes and well…. BeerCon4 providing exactly the kind of anarchy you’d expect in the green room backstage!
By now you should know about the awesome mythical infosec band of rock gods known as The Beer Farmers. If you don’t here’s a blog post explaining who they are and what they do!
The main change is that some have moved to pursue solo careers so the current lineup is: Mike Thompson, Lisa Forte, Nikki Webb, Sean Wright and Ian Thornton-Trump. The roadie team comprised Gerrard Barrett, Atomic Maya, David McKenzie, and Sam Humphries who were all amazing. Especially Maya and Gerrard who were sorting mics, sound on both the venue and the live virtual feed, and a plethora of other things! Thanks to all of you!
The Beer Farmers have now produced four BeerCons and this was certainly the most ambitious. First, it was live at DTX London over two days, but also live streamed. Rookies were welcomed to talk, but also established speakers were there and interspersed with each other. I think it was a great two days and loved many of the talks – you can catch them all here:
Time At The Bar!
So not only is this my first talk, it’s the first talk since starting my new role of Developer Advocate for a company called Sonatype. They are creators and custodians of the open source build tool Apache Maven, but also have paid dependency management tools. I started the day before, so was hoping it would go well.
I had chosen to talk about the Flipper Zero in a talk called That Flippin’ Dolphin.
For those that don’t know about the Flipper Zero, it’s a hacking multi-tool with an added Tamagotchi style interface of a dolphin. It’s very cute indeed! There are some really cool things you can do with it like open fuel caps on cars, use it as a universal remote, open garage doors, store credit cards on, and much more. I really liked the idea of it when it was a Kickstarter project, and have been trying things out ever since. One thing to mention though is that if the things you’re testing it on aren’t yours, get permission. Although using on your own stuff, or stuff you have permission to use on is legal, failure to get permission and suitable authorisation to use on the systems you want to test is a crime with a serious jail sentance. You really need to be aware of that before using it.
Anyhow, it is a LOT of fun and the cute dolphin can be seen listening to audio tapes etc. Essentially most uses of the Flipper Zero involve the need to capture something and then replay that thing to a system to obtain access or use a resource in an interesting way. It certainly has caused some mixed feelings with the general public, because it makes some attacks a lot easier. The way I see it, you can perform these attacks without a Flipper Zero, making it easier just makes the role of security professionals easier so that we can all build better systems. Hopefully instead of thinking of banning tools we will actually build better systems.
Well, that’s my rambling over! If you want to watch my talk, find it below and be sure to check all the others out too!
Update: Also well worth a read is a great article on a few uses of the Flipper Zero from James Bore on Hacker Noon – enjoy!
Till the next time. -x-
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