Black Hat and the constant accompyning headlines!

So, recently there was the Black Hat conference in Vegas. For those of you who are less informed, this is basically a large gathering of security researchers presenting their latest findings. And by findings I mean what they have recently broken. Most people dub this a "hacker" conference which is not to unreasonable, but I have one issue with it. The media coverage of it.

The only reason the term "hacker" is used is to sound sexy to the media. They hear that word and they are doing backflips through rings of fire to get the story. And as we are aware the media doesn't always get it right when reporting computer security related issues. Black hat presentations are geared to getting the media attention and causing a bit of a frenzy.

A prime example of that is Don Bailey's presentation which was entitled "War Texting: Identifying and Interacting with Devices on the Telephone Network" which does raise some valid points about connectivity of critical devices (details in another post) but it was also well marketed. He showed that he could unlock cars just by sending a few text messages. When normal people hear something like "vulnerability in FPGA-based control systems" or something similar they do not really know what it means.


Say "I can unlock your car with my phone" and they are scared. Don did say (quote in this article) "I could care less if I could unlock a car door. It's cool. It's sexy. But the same system is used to control phone, power, traffic systems. I think that's the real threat." Which is basically my grievance. As security researchers, we have to sexy up our ideas and then present them to the general populous. Which in turn leads to what I would deem to be an inconvenience.

If you want media attention, then you research on topics that you can sell with a little bit of FUD. Which does restrict your scope quite a lot. This then has a further effect that people view security researchers as only doing this kind of research. This leaves the more theoretical people, like myself, out in the cold, so to speak. Which may or may not be a bad thing, I am not really sure, but I am very sure that it does grind my gears a smidge.