The three French reporters who were banned for sniffing traffic in the Black Hat press room have skipped out on a scheduled press conference at Defcon.  The trio captured the login data of other reporters, but say the whole thing was done as a joke and wanted to explain their position at 2PM today.  Well, it’s now almost 3 PM and they haven’t shown up.

Three French reporters attending the Black Hat computer security conference have been banned for life for sniffing the press room network.  The hackers worked for a French security publication called Global Security Magazine and admitted to capturing login information of two other reporters covering the convention.  Our legal sources tell us the three could face federal charges for wiretapping.

The security pros at Black Hat got a little surprise this year with the appearance of the infamous Wall of Sheep.  Run by a loose group of volunteers, the wall displays usernames, passwords (partially obscured) and services sniffed from the wireless network.  This is all done in the name of security awareness and several security pros have already been caught.

The press at the Black Hat and Defcon conventions have always been somewhat exempt from hacking, but today we saw journalist on journalist hacking with editors from Eweek and News.com as the victims. Traditionally, the press room network has been relatively secure because the Wall of Sheep team promised to not sniff the reporters, but that promise didn’t extend to another reporter who fired up Cain and began scanning traffic. He quickly found two of his competitors on the network, logging into their respective administrator panels. 

The Internet relies on trust, but what if all that trust comes tumbling down?  That’s exactly the problem noted security researcher Dan Kaminsky described today in his Black Hat talk about DNS cache poisoning.  Several months ago, Kaminsky discovered a vulnerability in the DNS protoctol that allowed bogus name information to be sent to other servers and desktop computers – in essence hackers could redirect web surfers, chat clients and even email servers to machines of their choosing.  Specific details about the vulnerability and the ways to exploit it have been kept secret until today …