z3 Networks Ltd.

So last weekend I took a trip up to Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city, for NZ’s very own hacking and security convention Kiwicon 2k8.  It was nice to get our and see some more of the country as I’ve been pretty busy since I moved here, and as an added bonus I was able to learn me some new haxz0r’ing skills, haha.  Yeah yeah yeah… I know… a whole week to get this entry posted?  Pssh, it takes time to recover from something like KiwiCon, and of course on top of that I’ve still got actual work to do, anyways, enjoy!

On KiwiCon 2k8…

What do Kiwis, computers, beer, tinfoil hats, and tokemon all have in common?  Kiwicon 2008 of course!  This was a smaller convention with I’d guesstimate at around 200-250 attending, but that can be even more enjoyable and educational then a 10,000 person Con like DefCon.  You can checkout the schedule of presenters that attended here.

Highlights from day one for me included the presentations “Peter Gutmann: Why Biometrics is Not a Panacea: A Comedy of Errors in Three Parts” as well as “Philip Whitmore & Sander Reerink: Walking Through Walls Ninja Style – The Art of Non-Destructive Entry.”  The only downside was that for such an in depth and well renowed security specialist such as Peter Gutmann an hour was by far not enough time to go through everything… but hey we only have two days in the weekend right?  After the convention itself was done for the day everyone headed to Shooters bar in the midst of Wellington’s nightlife downtown to drink, hack, and compete in ‘Tokemon.’

Tokémon is a hacking game designed to be both challenging and fun. Ok, its really meant to be more fun than anything! The idea is based around providing game players access to a specially designed network that is loaded with vulnerabilities.  Discover and exploit a vulnerability, and you gain a token. Log that token in against your account, and you get some points. Which are redeemable… for beer. Consider it a self-regulating Hawkes Handicap System(tm).

Onto day two, and seriously… whoever decided having KiwiCon/Tokemon on the Saturday that we lost an hour due to DST needs to go sit in a corner, because free breakfast sunday or not a Tokemon induced hangover from hell was pretty much universal as it was, and the lost hour of sleep definately didn’t help, but I digress.  The Con will continue whether rain or shine, hungover or not, and it did just that.  I quite enjoyed the presentation “The Paul Craig Omnibus: The Moth Trojan & Who Got Pwnd?” since Paul decided to give botnets and malware a taste of their own medicine, and finally “Longpipes: The Art Of War – Blitzkrieg” was a good wrap-up for an overall exceptional weekend!

On Wellington…

I have to say that Wellington is easily one of the most awesome cities I’ve visited to date.  Its incredibly scenic on the edge of the bay set among all the foothills.  Streets twist and turn up and down the hills as very little excluding downtown is actually on level ground, and with almost 12% of New Zealand’s population (about 550,000 around the Welly region) its the second largest city in the country.  Being that it’s a pretty young population aged 20-34 accounting for the majority of people in the region the night life and pubs are incredibly fun and quite diverse.  Sunday evening after the convention was over I decided to go for a hike from my room downtown at Just Hotel up to the highest point I could find in the foothills, of course along the way I shot tons of pictures.  I lucked out and ended up at the Stellum Memorial Park summit which had an nicely angled camera stand so I was able to get some great full cityscape night shots… take a look at ‘Walking Wellington.’

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