Pat Gray, Founder of Risky Business, Joins Decibel as Founder Advisor. Great interview at
https://www.decibel.vc/articles/pat-gray-founder-of-risky-business-joins-decibel-as-founder-advisor
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Texas hacker-people - Ringzer0's BOOTSTRAP25 conference is in Austin, Texas one week from today (Friday night mixer, Saturday day conference)! Mixer tickets are $70, full-day conference pass for Saturday (including workshops) is $249. It should be an amazing event and I hope to see you there!
Registration @ https://ringzer0.regfox.com/bootstrap25-austin
Schedule @ https://cfp.ringzer0.training/ringzer0-bootstrap25-austin/schedule/The worst part of the Unciphered story isn't that accused-rapist Morgan Marquis-Boire was a co-founder and only his alias "Frank Davidson" was known to employees; it is that Eric Michaud co-founded the company with him and conspired to keep the team from knowing about it. Infosec has its pariahs for a reason (Cap'n Crunch, Jacob Applebaum, Morgan Marquis-Boire, and to a lesser degree Christopher Hadnagy): https://archive.ph/IQ7SK
The Tarlogic claim of backdoor functions in the ESP32 Bluetooth firmware seems overblown. The features they identified require privileged code execution and are helpful for improving open source software for these devices.
Useful resources:
- https://darkmentor.com/blog/esp32_non-backdoor/
- https://x.com/naehrdine/status/1898703255883886909
- https://esp32-open-mac.be/ (WiFi, not BT, but similar work)Hanno Böck (of badkeys.info among other projects) posted an interesting article about OpenID Connect implementations that mix up their public and private keys: https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/909-Mixing-up-Public-and-Private-Keys-in-OpenID-Connect-deployments.html
It doesn't look like Chris Hadnagy's lawsuit against DEF CON is going well: https://www.reddit.com/r/Defcon/comments/1ivo7x0/hadnagy_vs_defcon_et_al_motion_for_summary
>Hadnagy complains that Def Con’s statements harmed his reputation. But a person earns their reputation, good or bad, through their actions.
Congratulations to Charles Blas for winning the runZero hacktop raffle at CruiseCon 2025! This is a GPD Pocket 3 running Ubuntu Mate, preloaded with a fully licensed, offline version of the runZero Platform. You can find pictures and Charle's take at: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/charlesblas_cruisecon2025-activity-7298351951610552320-TD4m/
The DeepSeek mobile app does some really silly things, like plain-text HTTP for the registration sequence. Great reverse-engineering and analysis by NowSecure! https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/02/deepseek-ios-app-sends-data-unencrypted-to-bytedance-controlled-servers/
This is still one of my favorite photos from DEF CON 9 (2001). It was taken with an actual film camera from behind the security desk (and about a foot from the staff) in the Imperial Palace. The "diskette" warning is about the Keno machine, the 3.5" floppy contained the random seed for the day. The alarm codes speak for themselves =D