Hackers still strong despite soft economy

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Hackers still strong despite soft economy

Not even a recession can stall the hacker institution that is Hack in the Box (HITB).

In its eighth year, this year’s Kuala Lumpur leg drew a 300-strong crowd from all over the world.

Initially expecting lesser numbers, HITB’s Dinesh Nair was pleasantly surprised at the turnout.

“We had a full capacity crowd at the keynote, over 400 people turned up.” HITB founder Dhillon Andrew Kannabhiran said the turnout was encouraging and bode well for future conferences.

Though the Kuala Lumpur and Amsterdam HITB conferences saw good attendances, the Dubai leg will be scrapped next year due to low registration numbers.

Dinesh attributed it to current economic challenges noting that the ICT sector in Dubai was far less vibrant than it was in past years.

Security superstars

A highlight of the conference was bringing together two big industry names: Chris Wysopal and Paul Vixie, veritable legends in the security and networking space.

Wysopal is a member of elite hacker group L0pht and is considered one of the most influential figures in ICT security today.

Vixie is often hailed as the father of the domain name system (DNS), an essential component of the Internet as we know it today.

His speech was probably the most controversial of the conference, when he took current Internet security companies to task for being ‘reactive’ to threats when it was their role to be at the forefront of security.

When asked about security analysts’ reputation as doomsayers, Wysopal laughed and said that in their line a healthy amount of paranoia was very much necessary.

“Let’s put it this way. Security (experts) consider every neighbourhood to be bad neighbourhoods and we happen to be the ones keeping an eye out.”

On the networking front, Vixie had his own dark prophecy: that by February 2011 the Internet would have run out of iPv4 addresses.

IPv6 is a protocol created to succeed IPv4 Internet addresses. On the Internet an ‘address’ is a numerical label assigned to specific devices on the Web. IPv4 addresses can only run up to 32-bits while IPv6 supports up to 128-bit addresses.

It is estimated that IPv4 can only support up to 4.3 billion addresses, meaning that all the addresses will soon be taken up. Yet according to Vixie, IPv6 is already nearing exhaustion. “Internet growth will see a slowdown and perhaps the only way to address this is by getting people to dual-stack.”

Dual-stacking is a technique that allows the running of both protocols at the same time.

Where conditions are favourable, the IPv6 protocol will be run but if it isn’t, then at least there will still be the IPv4 protocol to fall back on.

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[url=http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/business/article/hackers-still-strong-despite-soft-economy/]Hackers still strong despite soft economy - The Malaysian Insider[/url]