Black Hat 2013 Showcases Home Security, Bootkits, Cellular OPSEC Failures

[NOTE: Black Hat and Dark Reading are both part of UBM Tech. As the key July 27th-August 1st information security event in Las Vegas approaches, we'll be sharing information about the show directly from its creators here on Dark Reading.]

Major information security event Black Hat has announced three more featured talks -- just the start of an avalanche of new briefings being announced on the Black Hat USA website. We're highlighting three of them here --- focusing on diverse subjects spanning home security system hacking, bootkit threats across multiple OSes, and OPSEC failures involving the American intelligence community and cellphones.

Home and office security systems are big business, with more than 36 million installed in the United States. In Let's Get Physical: Breaking Home Security Systems and Bypassing Buildings Controls, Bishop Fox's Drew Porter and Stephen Smith will show you just how easily these systems can be bypassed, with no physical evidence. Whether it's slipping past a simple door sensor or intercepting the signal from a keypad before it alerts authorities, expect live demos of the shockingly effective techniques security system manufacturers don't want you to know.

The next Briefing moves from securing buildings to securing computers. UEFI hasn't turned into the security panacea some backers suggested, with a number of practical bootkits already in the wild. Mario Vuksan and Tomislav Pericin's Press ROOT to Continue: Detecting MacOS and Windows Bootkits with RDFU will detail the creation of their Rootkit Detection Framework for UEFI ("RDFU"), which addresses the bootkit threat across a range of UEFI implementations. After the talk they'll release the RDFU's source code along with whitepapers outlining possible uses.

Finally, OPSEC Failures of Spies delves into the tragicomic world of CIA blunders. Journalist Matthew Cole will take you behind the scenes of the agency's infamously bungled 2003 extradition of a Muslim cleric in Italy, which resulted in an Italian court issuing arrest warrants for 26 Americans. This incident showed just how little the CIA understood about cellular OPSEC, and as Cole will recount, it failed to learn its lessons by 2011, when Hezbollah compromised an entire network of Lebanese informants thanks to similar mistakes. Come hear the true story of American intelligence's Keystone Kops.

More information about Black Hat USA 2013, which has a rapidly growing set of Briefings talks, as well as a comprehensive set of 2 and 4-day trainings, is available now -- early, reduced-rated registration is open until May 31st.