Voting machine maker ES&S says it did not cooperate with the Voting Village at hacking conference DEF CON because it worried the event posed a national security risk. This is according to a letter the biz sent to four US senators in response to inquiries about why the manufacturer was dismissive of the show's village and its …

Comment The hacking world's summer camp has ended. The last of the Black Hat USA, BSides Las Vegas, and DEF CON attendees and organizers have now left Sin City after a week of lectures, networking, and partying. What unfolded over those seven or so days will have knock-on effects for years to come – not just from researchers and …

DEF CON Hackers of all ages have been investigating America’s voting machine tech, and the results weren't great. For instance, one 11-year-old apparently managed to hack and alter a simulated, albeit deliberately hobbled, Secretary of State election results webpage in 10 minutes. The Vote Hacking Village, one of the most packed-out …

DEF CON American police and the judiciary are increasingly relying on software to catch, prosecute and sentence criminal suspects, but the code is untested, unavailable to suspects' defense teams, and in some cases provably biased. In a presentation at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas, delegates were given the example of …

DEF CON Rob Joyce, the former head of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations hacking team, has spilled the beans on which nations are getting up to mischief online. Joyce gave one of the first talks at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas and interest was intense - the lines to get in stretched around the hall. Joyce …

Broadcom billionaire cofounder Henry Nicholas was this week cuffed on suspicion of drug trafficking – after cops allegedly seized a huge stash of narcotics in his Las Vegas hotel suite. The chip design giant's 59-year-old ex-CEO and his companion Ashley Fargo were arrested on Tuesday night after security staff at the Encore …

Updated At midnight on Thursday, Matt Linton, a senior Google bod who was one of the key players in sorting out the Spectre CPU security hole mess, went to his hotel room in Caesars Palace, Las Vegas – and found his key no longer worked. When he went to reception to find out what the problem was, he was met by two security guards who …

About a quarter of a century ago, a handful of hackers decided to have a party in a cheap hotel, and had a whale of a time. Fast forward to 2018, and that get-together has grown into events that will see an estimated 30,000 people converge on Las Vegas for the biggest security shindig in the world – the combination of Black …

DEF CON The organizers of the DEF CON hacking conference, due to be held in Las Vegas, USA, next week, have put those who intend to spoil the event on warning: such tactics will not be tolerated. At last month's Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) event in New York City, several sessions were wrecked by white nationalist attendees spouting …

DEF CON Last year, the hackers at DEF CON showed how shockingly easy it was to crack into voting machine software and hardware. Next week, the 2018 conference's Vote Hacking Village will let kids have a shot at subverting democracy. Beginning on Friday, August 10, teams in three age ranges, 8-11, 12-14 and 15-16, will be let loose on …

Analysis BSides, Black Hat, DEF CON... For the last six days, Las Vegas has been home to the top brains in the computer security industry and the business menagerie that follows them – causing some panic among locals. We've seen the pathetic state of the US electronic voting system exposed, claims of advanced eavesdropping at the …

DEF CON Machine-learning tools can create custom malware that defeats antivirus software. In a keynote demonstration at the DEF CON hacking convention Hyrum Anderson, technical director of data science at security shop Endgame, showed off research that his company had done in adapting Elon Musk’s OpenAI framework to the task of …

Updated A Windows SMB vulnerability revealed late last week at DEF CON won't be patched because Microsoft says the service should be firewalled off from the internet anyway. The 20-year-old bug is in at least Windows 2000 to Windows 10. It was discovered by RiskSense bods, who combed Redmond's file server code for flaws similar to the …

DEF CON The BBC’s Micro:bit computer board may be winning over school kids, but hackers have found its wireless capabilities and programmable nature make it an excellent tool for mischief. In a presentation at this year's DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas on Friday, Damien Cauquil, senior security researcher at Econocom Digital …

DEF CON After the debacle of the 2000 presidential election count, the US invested heavily in electronic voting systems – but not, it seems, the security to protect them. This year at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas, 30 computer-powered ballot boxes used in American elections were set up in a simulated national White House …

DEF CON The world chess champion who was beaten by a computer today told the DEF CON hacking conference that we shouldn’t fear AI systems, but instead need to embrace them. Garry Kasparov was the chess wunderkind of his day but was creamed by IBM’s Deep Blue computer in 1997. That wasn’t even close to being an AI system, he said, …

DEF CON Businesses in Las Vegas are locking down their systems as hackers fly into the fetid hell of Sin City for a trio of security conferences. This week the BSides conference, Black Hat, and DEF CON are all in town and folks here are worried that their computers are going to be thoroughly subverted by visiting miscreants. Caesars …

Organizers at the DEF CON hacking conference in July are planning a mass cracking of US electronic election machines. The event, which for over 20 years has attracted the best and the brightest in the hacking community, will see a group hackathon against the voting machines that are used in every US election these days. The …