Seven Highly Anticipated Talks at Black Hat, DefCon Events

Cars, weapons, safes and death certificates will be part of the discussions at this year’s Black Hat USA 2015 and DefCon 23 security conferences.

The first big story to generate interest in the Black Hat USA 2015 event is Twitter security researcher Charles Miller and IOactive security researcher Chris Valasek’s talk on how to remotely hack a car. They are returning to the Black Hat podium this year, after having spoken on the subject in 2014.

Joshua Drake, senior director of platform research at Zimperium, is set to provide full details on the Stagefright Android media framework vulnerabilities, which have the potential to impact 950 million Android users.

At the DefCon 23 conference, Oscar Salazar, senior security associate at security firm Bishop Fox, and Dan Petro, security associate at Bishop Fox, are planning on bringing a Brink’s CompuSafe Galileo on stage and then hacking the safe to remove all the cash inside—within 60 seconds.

Security researchers Runa A. Sandvik and Michael Auger will discuss Internet of things rifles from firearm vendor TrackingPoint at Black Hat. Sandvik and Auger figured out how to hack into the weapon to alter targeting and affect how the ammunition is fired.

Colby Moore, manager of special activities at Synack, is speaking at Black Hat about his efforts in reverse-engineering and gaining access to the Globalstar Simplex data service, a satellite-based asset-tracking system. With the hack, vehicles such as bank trucks or semi-trailers can be hacked.

U.S. FBI Special Agent Elliott Peterson will join with Fox-IT security researcher Michael Sandee and Tillmann Werner, director of technical analysis at CrowdStrike Intelligence, to provide new color and details on the 2014 take-down of the Gameover Zeus botnet.

At a DefCon sesson, eerily titled “I Will Kill You,” Chris Rock, CEO of Kustodian Pty. Ltd., is slated to explain how to get a death certificate for a living person.