JerryGamblin.com.

I spent the last week in Moscow speaking at PHDays that was organized by Positive Technologies.

Let me just start this review off by saying I don’t think I have ever been to a conference with as good of lineup, organization, or venue as PHDays had.

The venue was Digital October in Moscow and I don’t think there is anything comparable to it in America. They had huge monitors (40 feet x 15 feet), great technical staff, instant translation, HD online streaming and awesome speaker support.

It has to easily  be one of the 5 best security conferences in the world based solely on the talks that were done in English.  It had the developers of SQLMAP, W3AF and Mimikatz all speaking about their projects. It had Travis Goodspeed and Sylvain Munaut talking about physical hardware manipulation. Those were just the English talks, the Russian talks were just as good.

The CTF was also pretty awesome to watch. They had a dumpster diving challenge where the teams had to try to find an MD5 hash. I hadn’t seen that before in a CTF and thought it was genius.

They also gave away two A.R. Drones during the CTF to any team that could hack them. Along with a ATM hacking contest that I missed but would have loved to have seen.

When you see the CFP for PHDays 2013 open up you really should submit. You will be treated great and given an opportunity to meet a whole group of people who are really passionate about computer security. I made a great deal of new friends from Russia, The independent nation of Appalachia and Europe over the last week and will never forget this trip.

An hilarious group of guys from a CTF team decided to stop by my PHDays talk and have a little fun.

I will have to say that this was one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time. After the talk I meet up with the guys and I now have a signed anonymous mask for my office.

1. If you ever heard a rapper talk about a car in a rap song I have seen it, and possible almost been hit by it, in the last three days.

2. There used to be a pool where this church stands.

3. In old Russian video games Americans are the bad guys.

4. Moscow has the best Sherbert I have ever ate.

5. They have rooms full of beanbags.

1. There is a McDonalds no more than 100 feet from the Kremlin. Why cant we be this efficient in America? 

2. Rollerblading is still a thing here, a very big thing.

3. They are just as excited about Madagascar 3 as I am.

4. Throwing a coin over your shoulder at Kilmetere Zero is good luck…

for these ladies who stand around and pick up all the coins people throw on the ground…

5. The Tsar likes big bells and can not lie.

1.  Just because you don’t speak Russian and your driver doesn’t speak English doesn’t mean you both cant belt out “Walking in Memphis” when it comes on the radio in the middle of a traffic jam. I think we bonded.

2.  Cheeseburgers in Moscow come with an egg on top (Why was I eating a cheeseburger? Because they were out of salads and it was the next thing on the menu I pointed at).

3.  If it fits, its a parking space.

4. If your $70K SUV doesnt stand out enough you cant always have it covered in snake skin.

5. Moscow has 13th Floors and -1 Floors.

We parody and poke holes in what they do.

Last day of session 2012.

Be so good they can’t ignore you.

When being interviewed on TV, make sure passwords are not written on wall behind you.

There has been some talk in my office about a fraudulent SMS charge scam on peoples AT&T bills over the last couple of months. There were 3 people in my office who got hit with this scam. I finally got around to examining our bill closer and found out that my wife’s phone had been hit by the same scam (For two months! Yes, shame on me for not looking closer at my bill and noticing this.).

The text message that came to my wife’s phone said this:

IQ Power: Welcome to Trivia Alerts! 3xmsgs/wk Monthly charge billed @ 9.99/mo. Reply HELP or call 8888906150 for help, STOP to cancel Msg&Data Rates May Apply

She Ignored it. Who wouldn’t? I have told a million people to ignore scam messages like this. Apparently with SMS text messaging though if you send unsolicited text messages to people saying that you are going to charge them $10 a month and they don’t respond you are allowed to do it?

This is what the charges on my bill looked like:

I had to contact AT&T (super fun) who said they would refunded the funds to my account and applied a purchase blocker to my account to prevent this in the future. Which is a start but it shouldn’t be allowed in the first place.

Yes I will be looking at my bills closer in the future.