Entropy Security Seminar
Mar 16th, 2007 by Kevin Holler
So yesterday myself, Colin and Thomas went up to Dublin to attend the Entropy Security seminar. We started out by geting on the Luas and then noticed we were going in the wrong direction! so after alot of walking, we arrived late got our name tags and went in. We went in and found some seats.
The first topic on the agenda was “Email and Web Threats in 2007”- Jason Steer, IronPort . We listen to a guy from the company try to advertise their product for a while, but it was interesting enough. They spoke about how some teenagers used these available programs to create Spam and Trojans to make thousands of dollars. We were all chuckling in the back.
Next up we had, “New web threats; the rise of video, Skype and P2P – cut the bad, control the mediocre and accelerate the good” - Kevin Thiele, Bluecoat . Another advertisement opportunity for the speakers. So we listened to how their system could manage a companies network and stop employees from viewing youtube, manage bandwidth and more..
Then we had our coffee! which was vital. We went to help ourselfs until we noticed that a guy was giving out the coffee and we had just skipped a cue. embarrassed we joined the cue.
Now the interesting topics began, all regarding wireless technology. fourth up was “ Wireless Security in the Enterprise”- Conor Flynn/Damien Moran Rits. He discussed how they had done some pentesting on companies and i took down a few of the statistics.
29% of wifi connections were unencrypted in Dublin ( not including hotspots ) 71% encrypted. Which is no great suprise as Eircom still ships their routers out with WEP protection as default when setup.
- 43% of companies use dangerously discriptive SSID’s
27% of AP’s still use the default SSID’s
23% do not broadcast SSID’s
So we learned that the best practice was WPA + 802.1x ( secure EAP )
The final talk was “There’s Wireless in the Air, how to keep your data from flying away. ”, which was interesting. They demontstrated how a WEP encyrpted access point was cracked. One thing that suprised me was that all of the demo was done with windows based tools, which were not mentioned. I have a feeling the company developed them. None the less i have requested the name of these tools, so we’ll see if i get them. with about 200,000 packets they had decrypted the 128bit WEP key, which is average, all in about 17 minutes.
