WirelessPhreak.com

I like to travel, f*ck with technology, and partake in the occasional tropical drink.
I am also a co-host on The NBD Show podcast.
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Another Defcon and Holly Shit there where lot of people. I registered Friday morning and they had run out of badges. Defcon has out grown the Rio, and to support that theory where rumors the Con would be moving. For conventions over 14,000 attendees the options narrow.  On the Defcon Wikipedia page and the Defcon DC News site they list Defcon 23 will be at both the Paris and Bally's hotels.  Not sure how that will workout, but it definitely needs a larger facility.  This may be mis information though, remember Defcon is canceled every year.

The theme this year at least the talks I attended was Botnets... Botnets... Botnets...  The first talk I attended was Domain Name Problems and Solutions with Dr. Paul Vixie. His talk was a deep dive into how Botnets and other nefarious entities are exploiting DNS. The industries movement to provide convenient and low priced DNS names are fueling the fire.  He also went into analysis of DNS meta data and how it is used in DNS RPZ or a (DNS Firewall.) 

Don't DDOS Me Bro: Practical DDOS Defense presented by Blake Self and Cisco Ninja, was one of the better talks I attended.  They spoke about Layer7 DDOS detection and defense, and brought some real world data from their site soldierx.com.  They presented some examples of multi layer defenses from F5 rules to Apache tools. They also released their DDOS monitoring tool RoboAmp that will run on a Raspberry Pi.

Lastly and trust me it was a tough talk to get to was Catching Malware En Masse: DNS and IP Style. OpenDNS presented tools and techniques they have developed to identify bonnet and malware traffic on the internet.  They also presented an awesome 3D visualization engine they use to graph and identify this rouge DNS and IP traffic. 

Between the parting and binge consumption there was a lot to take away from this years Defcon. It was good catching up with old friends and meeting new ones, and I can wait till next year.