Last week I attended my first meeting of the newly rebranded Technology Users Group (formerly known as the Charleston Java Users Group). I have to say that they hit this one out of the park.
They brought in Ken Sipe, a speaker from the No Fluff Just Stuff series, to give the talk. The title was "Hacking: The Dark Arts". I will admit, I expected that this was just a sensational title, and that it would be a generic talk about security. I was wrong. Ken started right into the interesting stuff, not just describing Cross Site Scripting and SQL Injection attacks, but actually walking us through some examples right there in the talk. He showed us how these techniques are used to discover vulnerabilities, and what they are capable of by attacking a demonstration site that has been set up for that purpose.
We covered many topics, including wireless security. In keeping with the style of the talk, rather than telling us WEP isn't secure, he showed us exactly how easy it is to crack a WEP key.
It was an eye opening talk, and a lot of fun. Scary, but much more interesting than security talks I have heard in the past. I look forward to next month's meeting and seeing what this group has in store next.
Comments