It’s another year of BSidesROC, a local hacker con that we put together. Our sixth year actually. Not everyone really cares about how BSidesROC has changed over the years but it’s hard not to at least mention them for posterity and laugh at our failures. I think that BSidesROC has evolved with the times or at least updated their memes. Year one was all about the memes and just messing around and to be honest, we didn’t care if anyone even showed up.

This post on hackernews got my attention. It’s a IoT based visualization showing your activities and health metrics. It’s very flashy and interesting looking, like you’re going to see it in an episode of CSI Cyber. The term “actionable” I’ve usually applied to government types discussing the latest threat intel but we can also take it to apply with our visualizations. Actionable visualizations, should provides the viewer with brand new information that could not have been easily concluded before.

I don’t remember the exact conversation, but Jason Ross inspired me to buy DRWND.com, as in Drone + PWND = DRWND. I’ve owned it for a bit waiting for some specific data so that I could use it as an informational site about DRWN attacks. As IANA web developer, this has been interesting and terrible but simple enough to share. www.drwnd.com I won’t assume the site makes any sense right now so I can summarize it like this: It takes a data feed of all known locations of drone strikes and plots them Circle size reflects the number of people killed Circle color reflect the percentage of the deaths that were civilians and/or children in an RGB manner Red – civilians Green – expected targets or unknowns Blue – children

PhantomJS is a headless browser that when you use Selenium, turns into a powerful, scriptable tool for scraping or automated web testing in even JavaScript heavy applications. We’ve known that browsers are being fingerprinted and used for identifying individual visits on a website for a long time. This technology is a common feature of your web analytics tools. They want to know as much as possible about their users so why not collect identifying information.