Neil Wyler, known as Grifter, recounts his early hacking, Defcon's evolution, Black Hat network defense and a threat hunt that uncovered recurring financial data transfers to a server in Russia.
Chris Monteiro exploited an access-control flaw on the Besa Mafia scam site, exposing messages about paid murder orders. He and journalist Carl Miller shared information with police and sought to warn people named in the orders.
Hardware hacker Joe Grand recounts his early hacking, L0pht’s vulnerability research and 1998 Senate testimony, including his work on electromagnetic eavesdropping and pager interception.
Conor Freeman describes stealing social media accounts using breached credentials and explains how attackers use social engineering to hijack phone numbers through SIM swaps.
The transcript describes researching a target and compromising people in their network first, so later emails to the target appear to come from someone they know.
The video describes Rustock’s five-day delay after infection, rootkit-based concealment, and layered command servers that relayed instructions to bots and made the botnet harder to disrupt.
The transcript describes a botnet that infected Windows machines to send spam, searched disks and network traffic for email addresses and passwords, and relayed data through repeaters to protected command-and-control servers.
The video explains how mules forward stolen money to scammers for a cut, obscuring its destination, and describes a fake-university scam that routed funds through mules and offshore accounts.
A fake university site collected applicants’ email addresses and passwords. The speaker says those credentials also enabled access to their Facebook accounts, while a tracker revealed users’ clicks and hovers.
The transcript describes a banking Trojan distributed through spam emails and drive-by downloads. It collected stored credentials, alerted hackers when victims logged in to online banking, and enabled unauthorized transfers.
