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Hear the fabulous exploits of one complete reject (in Las Vegas!)



Welcome to the Daily Gism. It's actually nowhere near daily. But it is updated fairly often. Being the ramblings of a young man who's principle interests include... Well, you'll see.
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Defcon



A disertation on Defcon. Vegas pops up out of the desert like a blister on the ass of God. There's this giant expanse of beautiful mountain, canyon, scrub brush, rolling hills. Then, Bang, the Mandaly Bay and all its compatriots come flying out of the valley and into your lap. All the while, these starnge signs on the side of the road keep telling you that the city of sin is still 14 miles away. It looks like you're just a mile or so away. But after 10 minutes more of driving towards the white-heads, you begin to see that the buildings are in fact larger than you first thought, and that most of them shadow the more extravagant buildings.

All the way through the desert, He'd been watching the industrial power lines pick their way through the hills and dales of southern California. These giant sentinals were perfect foreshadowing devices: they were the very embodiment of why He was out here. They not only carried the very life-blood of computerization, they carried the neurons and axioms of telecommunication: the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. Without those wires, not only would the machines go dark, they would also be alone.

The Alexis Park hotel was a strange place to hold a conference; an even stranger one to hold a hacker conference. It was set up like the branch dividian compound. At the center of the complex lay the lobby, pool, restaraunt, and other bits that He hadn't fully explored yet. He expected that the stratification of the structures would facilitate some amazing variance in the party scene.

After a quick shower, He sat and typed these very words. Next door, a cavalcade of young up-and-comers had assaulted Strick and He when they arrived. Frostbite, DC, and Cypris were actually in their car when Strick and He slipped into their parking space. Though neither party had been introduced yet, DC stuck his head out of the driver's side window of the massive white truck and made odd sounds at Him as He unpacked the car. He knew immediately that the occupants of the truck were here for Defcon. The social repugnance of most hackers does not preclude their greetings and introductions; it translates them into strange clicks, pops, whirs, and other anti-social communicative behavior.

His initial take on the Alexis Park did not delve deep enough. Upon further inspection, the facilities seemed to be host to noless than four seperate groups for the weekend. The hackers, of course, took up a large portion. But an equally sized portion of the hotel was alotted to the Olympus Danceathon. Olympus seemed to be aimed at young girls; ballet, tap, and possibly jazz dancers. Most were obviously from the midwest or other equally backwards places. Their mothers clucked like hens and fawned over their breast-budding daughters. Most of the dancers carried bitch-flip style bangs, moussed up to stand out from their tightly pulled back buns and pony tails. All of them knew they were sex-pots in training, and around the pools, they showed off as much skin as they could get away with. At any other convention, this would have been crewl and unusual punishment, but at a conference filled with script kiddies and other people below the statutory rape age, it was simply a god send.

In the lobby the midwest mothers mingled with fat, long-haired coders and mid-twenties laptop-junkies. The warm glow of LCD displays suffussed the mildly darkened room, and the occasional white glimmering apple illuminated those who dared to stand in front of the Mac in question. Twangy half-english was fired across the front desk at the overwhelmed staff as the geeks began to explore their surroundings. The scene was a microcosm twentyfirst century America: The technologically driven mingling with the down-home housewives and their bathing beauty daughters. Throw in a smattering of airlne employees filtering into the hotel over the weekend (the airport is driectly behind the Alexis Park) and the micrcosm becomes a stew of diametrically opposed industries and personalities.

The rest of the Gism.net stickers, and a few odd cables and laptops. Yes, laptops, plural. He'd give them away before the end of the weekend. He wanted to set up a "What the fuck is that?" contest with a strange suction-cup-electrical-device He'd found as exhibit A. Whoever could identify it would win an old Mac Duo 210 laptop. Then, if He could find something else to offer as an unknown item, he'd give away the Mac Powerbook 140.

DC and Strick came back into the room. Strick was already distributing Yak shirts, his own personal trinket of 31337-ness. He enjoyed gifting folks with the shirts in exchange for their friendship and idolitry. It was a good system, and had worked well for a long time now.

Friday night He gambled for the first time. The casino was the Rock Hard... er... Hard Rock, and it was an interesting experience. Along with him on his journey into sin were two extremely innebriated fellow Defcon attendees: Max and Chris. Neither had ever been gambling either.

The Hard Rock is the casino for everyone you ever hated in high school. Those that weren't trying to emmulate Swingers were decked out in the finest that Banana Republic had to offer. When the three of them walked in the entire room seemed to hush itself in quiet awe of the trio of nerds now standing before them. Were it not for the constant glitter of the slots and the rushed dealing of blackjack, the thick-necked jocks and scantilly clad pseudo-whores would have stuffed the three of them into the nearest lockers. Or, more likely, into the nearest slot machine.

But after the inital shock of jock-dom, the three would-be high rollers cashed in their money for quarters and began to insert them into slot machines. Max, the youngest in the bunch immediately tripled his initial investment of three dollars on his first pull. Chris and He were not so lucky, and didn't win money back until four machines later. After five minutes, they were all up on their inital investments. His own investment of two dollars was met with a dour frown when he changed his dollars for quarters at the cash-in girl. It was, perhaps, the smallest amount of money changing she had done all evening.

As they picked their way through the madding crowd, they came upon an interesting new game: casino war. Basically, it was the same war school children played with two decks of cards, except when you tied with the house, you had to double your bet to go to war. They skipped that one and headed to a $10 minimum blackjack table. Max sat down and tried to change his money. They carded him. Max had not informed Him of his underaged status. It was a fairly embarassing situation to be in. The rest of those at the table looked irrate; they glowered and informed Max that he had to leave the casino floor immediately. The three of them were in grave danger of being dragged into the nearest washroom and given a swirlly. They could almost hear the chants of "Nerds, nerds, nerds!" rising above the tumult of sports chatter, rock and roll, and swooning drunked pseudo-whores.

It should be noted that by pseudo-whore, He is refering to that class of female that spends its time around the roulette wheel waiting for the ball to drop on their love-target's number. 36 hits, and the gentleman is assured a fine soft female in his bed for the evening. And all she requires in exchange is a quick money wasting spree through the casino shopping court.

After a few more minutes of ups and downs on the slots, Jake, an extremely underaged and drunken individual, showed up for some quarter based joy. He immediately sat down and doubled Max's money at the blackjack table. Of course, on the hand after that, he lost it all again. But that wasn't the point, he was able to bet, and he was able to win, thanks to his extreme drunkenness and utter lack of exerience.

After another ten minutes of ups and downs at the hands of the one-armed bandits, the three wandered back to the Alexis Park. Max was even, if he didn't count the three dollars he'd lost on the slots. Chris was up two dollars and He was down two. Jake was nowhere to be found. When last seen, he had hit the jackpot on a nickle slot and was awash under sea of 5 cent pieces.

Later that evening, Jake stumbled into the Yak suite, completely incoherent and flat broke. It was an appropriate end to an evening's sinful duties.

Las Vegas is the perfect place for Defcon. Gambling is basically a giant exploit of the human mind. Most people can't do the math fast enough to realize that they're losing. It's a giant buffer overflow. Stuff enough alcohol into them and pass out the cards fast enough, and they won't notice you're screwing them.

And so He was royally screwed. Originally, He started His Saturday evening at the Terrible's. After an hour, He left $10 up on the craps table. On the way back, He stopped by the Hard Rock, made the minimum bet on black, and walked out $14 up on the whole day. Unfortunately, the gambling bug bit him hard and firm in buttocks. After a quick meal at the Alexis Park, He returned to the Terrible's (horrible name, eh?) and decided to bet the twenty dollars he'd originally intended to gamble with. After an hour, He was up $40 on blackjack. The man next to Him was in vaguely the same boat, but with a lot more money on the table. The man intimated that He wasn't quiting until he'd won $500.

"Well, shit!" He thought! "I'm not quiting until I'm up $100!" Unfortunately, this meant He had a long way to go, being only $40 up on His original $20. Thus, His time at the blackjack table ended in a complete and total loss. And, He returned to lose another $10 on the table next to the very one He began on.

Strangely, the rest of His evening was speant wishing He could return to break even. His first time, and He was hooked. He had become addicted to the exploit. Even the lamest of servers doesn't send out requests for further intrusion attempts.

The third day of the conference was technically Sunday, but by Saturday, most of those in attendence had three days worth of drunken tcp based debauchery under their belts. And it would only get worse. To quote Jeff Moss, one of the conference's organizers and a nine year veteran of the event: "Originally, it just started out as an excus to go to Vegas and drink." In that respect, Defcon 9 has held to its roots like a redwood tree.

But the overall tone for this year's Defcon was set early on Friday morning. A blue green minivan (bimbo box) peeled into the parking lot of the Alexis Park Hotel at around around 11 am. The 7 inhabitants of the vehicle spilled onto the curb, some drunk, other's tired, all exhausted. Most of those in the lobby carried bags of equipment, laptops, or tool belts. These seven carried only their clothing (most of it in bags) and stacks of white print-outs.

They had wound their way down the coast from San Francisco along 101, 1, 58, and the infamous 46 that took James Dean straight to hell.

Now, they were in Las Vegas, and the hot-blooded northerners began to feel the sun bring their veins to roiling boils. Sadly, the silver screen has never properly conveyed just how hot the city is. This works in favor of the casinos: the hotter it is outside, the more effort it takes to walk to the next spectacle down the strip.

The population of Defcon, however, would have to walk a long way to get to the nearest slot machines and blackjack tables. The Alexis Park is a "Family" establishment, after all. For the currency laiden debauchery, the 21 year olds would have to walk across the street to the Rock Hard, er... Hard Rock Casino. In the world of Geek warfare, there was no greater irony than the positioning of such an establishment so close to a herd of potential locker stuffing.

The seven residents of the minivan burst into the lobby, alive with life again after their near-coma states only an hour earlier. Immediately, they set to the task at hand: rooting Defcon. Not with the instruction sets from a computer. They weilded the instruction set of humanity: propaganda.

This being the ninth Defcon in as many years, the conference is beginning to show its age. There are more attendees. More hotel rooms. More bandwidth. More rules.

And as a result, more people try to break those rules. Nowhere does this happen as elegantly as at the hands of hackers. The true spirit of hacking lies not only in it's code , pomp, and circumstance, but also in its sense of irony, rebellion, and necessity for poetic justice.

Naturally, the organizers of Defcon did not wish incite illicit activity on the part of the more unsavory (young) element. This is why most of the rules are not stated. Any actual rules would be seen as challenges. So, many minor laws were ignored: under aged drinking, port sniffing Yahoo.com, even selling 5 day old roach infested pizza were fair game. However, the unspoken rules were thought to be sacred.

And so, the seven began to hand out their anti-defcon writings. Each pamphlet contained, not blasphamy, but dogmatic mandate.

"Throw a brick, grease the steps, pull the fire alarm, break a window, hack .mil's from the internal network" The list went on and on. It also said a few words about the overbearing nature of Defcon this year. But that wasn't the point. The goal of the sheets was simply to instill the seeds of thought into the minds of the impressionable.

"Charge stuff to Jeff Moss's room, get the con raided, slash a fed, FUCK DEFCON UP!"

For the most part, the suggestions fell on deaf ears, however. Those that would be most easily persuaded already had their own prank plans. Thursday night, there were two main schools of pranking. The first decided to dump 8 gallons of vegitable oil into the hotel's third pool. The second school wasn't anywhere near as elegant or original: Golf Cart. Preferably on top of Pete Shipley, the guiding father of Dis.org. This plan was as much rooted in alcohol as it was in tradition. Thankfully for most of those involved, the drunken goofball charged with the task of stealing the golf cart never figured out how to get it in reverse, and remained marooned against a wall for several minutes before regurgitating on the steering wheel and retreating to his room.

The vegitable oil went off without a hitch. The pool became covered in a thin slick of grease, and resulted in a viscous layer of liquid vegi around anything that was dipped into it.

The oil incident passed with relative quiet, however, as most of those present at the first night's festivities barely remembered it the next day. That is, until they saw a stewardess running to her room screaming and cursing at her slimmy predicament. None fo the oil brigade were caught.

Half of the flyer handler's were ejected from the hotel, however. Ironically, most of them were well to-do high class programmers, and simply took their party across the street to the infamous Hard Rock.

The hacker scene is an ever changing environment filled with a wide variety of subculture cross over. At its very heart, there is the gothic-fetish-fire-drug world. Nowhere is this more apperant than within the rank and file of groups.

Defcon is a conference of groups. Hackers clump, much like platelets. In the dark recesses of the Internet the digital equivilent of hushed whispers accompany the names of the most 31337 of groups: Dis.org, New Hack City, Cult of the Dead Cow. Almost everyone at DefCon belongs to a group. Whether it's a quiet local conclave of sub-puberty crackers, or a multinational incorporated entity, groups are the lifeblood of the conference.

Of the three previously mentioned groups, by far the most infamous and reputable is the Cult of the Dead Cow. Originally founded in the late eighties, the Cult is an ever changing public relations nightmare. This is precisely its goal. Along with a large number of cryptic BBS postings, obscure press releases, and extremely graphic corporate product introductions, the Cult of the Dead Cow has elevated itself to the status of grand high poobah in the hacker community. Originally a splinter group of the ever-popular L0pht, the Cult expanded itself, member by member until it became the bastion of code and exploits that it is known to be today.

To explain the Cult, we must first understand the L0pht. Another product of the turbulent (and 1200 baud) eighties, L0pht origninally staked out its place amongst the BBS's of Boston, and began to grow more and more 31337 as the years passed. Eventually, in the early 90's, the web sprang up, and L0pht became a bonified web presence. With their T-1 in hand, L0pht began releasing hand-coded exploits for modern networked operating systems.

Eventually, the L0pht's web-boards swelled with sub-cultures, zines, and just plain dirty stuff. Some of this dirty stuff spun outwards into the entitiy that is now known as the Cult of the Dead Cow.

Sadly, the L0pht is no more. While it does still exist in name, it has become a hollow shell of it's former anti-establishment self. At the 2001 RSA conference in San Francisco, L0pht (now known as @stake) held a conference party. Within the confines of the Thirsty bear (a tapas joint known for conference parties) no fewer than 98% of those in attendance wore suits. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

The Cult of the Dead Cow, however, has contnued to exist as a quasi-hacker community for almost two decades now. Recently, it has begun to enter into the software community with it's now infamous Back Orifice. The original release allowed any Windows user with one-time access to a target's machine to control the terminal remotely via a simple command-line. At Defcon 8 in 2000, the Cult released Back Orifice 2k, a refined version of the exploit software that added numerous masqueradeing options. With these new options, BO2K allowed for a near indetectible exploitation system. Even the tcp/ip port could be changed to allow for more easily obfuscated transactions with the end server. In all, BO2K was a masterful piece of hacker code.

Most of this excellence came at the hands of Sir Dystic. Uber-coder Dystic headed up the coding of BO2K, and is currently captaining a new project: Peak-a-booty. Using the currently en vogue peer-to-peer model, Peak-a-booty is intended to allow peoples behind national firewalls to see the rest of the internet. When he introduced to project at HOPE 2K (Hackers on Planet Earth 2000), Sir Dystic stated that the project was intended to free the citizens of China to explore the net without their govermentally imposed restrictions.

While the Cult of the Dead Cow holds sway over the entirety of the hacker community, other groups, Dis.org and New Hack City, continually push the limits of acceptible coding. Dis.org, headed by the messiahnic Peter Shipely (widely thought to be one of the most talented professional hacker in the world) is a band of rag tag rebels who spend most of their time exploiting corporate networks, holding extreme bondage parties, and generally living the dark hacker lifetyle. One member in particular, B-String, is widely known to be one of the most prolific hobo's on the west coast. That's right, he steals rides from Amtrak. It's not uncommon for B-String to appear at the 2600 meeting San Francisco, and then head down the coast on a free-ticket to 2600 LA.

Disorg, or Dis org crew, as their shirts, patches, and stickers say, is the epitome of the black hat hacker culture. While most of the higher eschelons of hacker cliques see the group as deviant and cliquish, there is no denying the skill and talent of some of its members. While a good number of Dis org's posse are confirmed professional crackers/hackers, there is also an outer onion skin of the group that is mainly for show. At conferences like Defcon, Dis org's ranks are bolstered by short skantilly clad women shimmying and shaking up and down the floor, wearing DOC shirts. According to legend, most of these women are part o Pete Shipley's inexorable harrem, but this has never been confirmed.

What has been confirmed is that the majority of the members of Dis org are deviants by nature, and drug use, rampant promiscuity, and fetish/bondage clothing is the rule, not the exception.

Alongside Dis.org is New Hack City, a splinter group of the Cult of the Dead Cow, most accuratly characterized as CDC West. Although the group has dwindled recently, it's members were the driving force behind most of the BO2k Q/A process, and helped develop most of the exploits and customizations the package included. Many members of NHC hold allegiance to other splinter groups. Among them is Ghetto Tech, a small group of stoner/coders who spend their time playing Tony Hawk, messing with DNS, and writing illicit Perl scripts.

Ghetto Tech is not to be confused with the Ghetto Hackers, however.

While Defcon 9 offered some fresh new speakers and interesting discussion tracts, the highlight of the show is still the perpetually confusing capture the flag (ctf) tournament. It seems as though the rules are a direct evolutional descendant from bacteria: hour after hour, the rules expand and contract, mutate and transform according to the stimmuli they recieve. Basically, CTF is a contest to see just who has the biggest hacking balls of them all.

CTF begins when Defcons internal network comes online. Players join teams and stake out entire class C's to defend. From there, the rules begin to get fuzzy, but a rough approximation of gameplay follows:

Two teams, The Ghetto Hackers and the Monkey Boys set up on the ip class C's 10.255.20 and 10.255.30 respectively. The machines at 10.255.20.250 through 10.255.20.255 and 10.255.30.250 through 10.255.30.255 are set up as servers to be defended. Each team allocates it's people to the tasks of Sysadmin or Hacker: Sysadmins maintane the servers, and hackers cut through the opposing force's systems. The job of the Sysadmin is, obviously, to keep the hackers out. The Hackers, however, not only have to get into a hostile server, but also to leave a disk image on the root directory of the server's harddrive.

Of course, it's nowhere near that simple. Within 10 minutes of the game beginning, one team rewrote the entire network's arp tables (databases used to keep track fo whatc machines are where) and routed 90% of the network's traffic through their own systems. Not only did this allow them to watch everyone's activities, it also allowed them to redirect attackers back at their own systems. There was a distinct possibility that any port scanning done by an assalant resulted in a listing of the ports open on the machine he was scanning from. Unfortunately, the team was caught with their hands red, and penalized 10 points.

Alongside the uber-hax0rs playing for teams, a cavalcade of unaffiliated admins and hackers squatted on 10.255.0 and played, not for points, but for the shear joy of being able to hack without repercussions.

And that is essentially what Defcon is all about. 1000's of kids and adults from around the world descend on Las Vegas to get away from the hostile and conservative worlds in which they live. Hacking has become a taboo subject in some circles, thanks to bluntly biased media portrayal. Recently, Frontline, a typically level-headed PBS news program, filmed a documentary on the hacker community. Unfortunately, the program became a near indictment of the hacker lifestyle, casting a dark light on some of the most talented coders and visionaries in the community. It was a tough blow for many in the hacker world who have faught so hard to put a better face on the culture. The Cult of the Dead Cow, for example, gave an hour long question and answer session at Defcon in which they espoused the need for the higher levels of the scene to direct their efforts towards freeing information for those who are restricted from seeing it.

But the hacker world will probably always remain a dark and frightening place for the American mainstream. As long as Dis Org continues to overdose and throw sex parties; as long as script kiddies continue to take down large systems with but a mouse click; as long as the youthful rebelious spirit remains at the heart of the hacker world, mainstream America will never fully grow comfortable with the scene. And this is precisely what the scene wants.

After cutting his losses in the casinos, He returned to the Alexis Park to enjoy His final night in the city of sin. Tomorrow, He would pile into the small, blue-green minivan and head towards San Francisco at upwards of 80 miles per hour. Defcon had been fun, but the whole experience didn't settle well in his stomache. Perhaps it was simply the four glasses of box wine he'd consumed, but more likely it was because of the gentrification that had been taking place all around Him. Defcon was always about rebellion. Yet those that had most completely rebeled against the conference were now portrayed on polaroids on the wall of the security office. Underneath lay instructions to immediately eject any and all persons handing out flyers on the show floor.

He had been asked to help hand out flyers. He had declned, stating that He didn't feel it was appropriate for someone wearing a press badge to distribute the materials. Mark, the one asking for His help, replied with words that struck right to the core of Him: "Sure, it's not the press's place to fight for freedom of speech. Nevermind."

After that, He had to get out of Vegas. The weasels were closing in, and, after all, this was bat country. It was 40 miles to Baker, then one long high speed drag to San Francisco, and safe obscurity. Just another geek in the geek community.
























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