14 DAY TRIAL // Two more presentations scheduled for this week’s Black Hat USA conference, have been removed from the briefing panel, one on manipulating wireless home alarm systems and the other on a sophisticated Russian cyber-espionage tool.
The presentation schedule of the security conference is now missing three talks, as last month another one was pulled, about a low-cost method to de-anonymize users relying on TOR (The Onion Router) to protect their identity, based on research from Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord working at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
The legal counsel of the university told the Black Hat organizers that the reason behind the decision to cancel the talk was that it had not been approved.
One of the latest canceled presentations was supposed to be held by Logan Lamb, security researcher at Oak Ridge National Lab, and referred to lax security in wireless home alarm systems, which allowed interception of the radio frequency signals responsible for triggering the alarm; furthermore, commands could be decoded and directed at the control panel of the alarm as the attacker saw fit.
In the other canceled talk, Sergei Shevchenko, of BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, was supposed to demonstrate the functionality of the Snake malware, also known as Turla and Uroburos, a tool of Russian origin used for espionage activities.
Although Shevchenko will no longer expose the techniques used by Snake at Black Hat, a whitepaper from BAE on the subject is available, offering more details about the cyber tool.