The Dark Visitor

The picture seen above is an advertisement for a Chinese hacker training course.  Now I know many of you are struggling to process this information;  something seems wrong with the picture.  The reason your brain is having trouble with the image,  is that it is located in a place called, the “outdoors”.  Like me, many of you spend way too much time online and this poster is horribly out of place.

The following report from China Daily talks about the growing public concern over hacking and online hacking courses.  It also interviews Wang Xianbing, a consultant for hackbase.com:

“Lots of hacker schools only teach students how to hack into unprotected computers and steal personal information,” said Wang Xianbing, a security consultant for hackerbase.com. “They then make a profit by selling users’ information.”

For investing hundreds of yuan in hacker school, students could obtain the skills to make a fortune, Wang said.

“Hacker school is a bit like driving school – they teach you how to drive but it’s up to you if you are going to drive safely or kill someone,” said Wang.

What the article doesn’t tell you is that Wang Xianbing is also known as Janker and the Lonely Swordsman; one of China’s first generation of hackers and the leader of online conflicts with the US and Japan.

Thanks to everyone who showed up to the Dark Visitor meetup at DEFCON 17.  It was a lot of fun and I had a great time joking around and talking shop with everyone.  The only gambling that I did was deciding on the Korean BBQ place close to the con hotel – the food was pretty good and they reserved a nice area for the group (of 21) so I guess the gamble paid off. I hope everyone had as much fun as I did. There was a lot of praise for Heike’s book as well as the work we’re doing together on the blog – that was all very much appreciated. We need to convince Heike to come out to DEFCON18 next year… Come on, Vegas isn’t so bad.

I spent most of my time at the con attending presentations.  There were at least two presentations that featured a slide devoted to Xiao Tian and the Dark Visitor got mentioned in two presentations.  I think that we should setup a scholarship fund to sponsor Xiao Tian so she can come to Vegas next year and meet with us.

So I decided to put together a give away for people who attended the meetup and settled on a CD packed full of Chinese hacker papers and videos. I put a nice lightscribe label on all of them and included “The Dark Visitor” in Chinese characters. Well apparently I entered the characters rather hastily and instead of 黑客, I put 黑咯, which means Dark Cough (according to Ming Zhou). So at least I learned a new character and maybe that will be the name of the next big disease that comes out of Asia. Who knows? Maybe the flawed Dark Visitor CD will turn out to be the next ultra rare one-eyed beanie baby or something (I’ll start planting them on ebay tomorrow).

Heike and I have talked about having some TDV wearable stuff. Perhaps a Titan Rain Suit? Maybe a “Certified Great Firewall Engineer” T-Shirt? How about a Javaphile Coffee Shop baseball hat? Sunwear tanktop? Let us know what you think. We’ll think of something clever to do with the proceeds like buy Xiao Tian an HD webcam.

Online sales for the Melbourne Film Festival’s showing of the “Ten Conditions of Love” have been halted due to an attack on the website ticketing system by Chinese hackers.  According to AFP:

Chinese hackers crashed the website of Australia’s biggest film festival, organisers said on Saturday, escalating tensions over a visit here by the exiled leader of the Uighur minority.

Online bookings for the Melbourne International Film Festival had to be shut down after the site was bombarded with phony purchases which resulted in the entire program being sold out, said festival spokeswoman Asha Holmes.