At that point, we declared victory, high-fived and moved on to the third challenge. In the end, we had created a wholly fictional person - Olga Smirnoff, Russian Ambassador to the United States and a member of the Russian GRU (military intelligence) we then had the LLM associate this fictitious person as the paramour of the Senator and his covert handler for the GRU, with whom said senator was passing national security secrets. The essential takeaway from DEF CON 31 – an official hacker badge. Participants were issued the rules of engagement, a "referral code," and brought to one of the challenge's terminals (provided by Google). We spoke with one of the organizers of the challenge, Austin Carson of SeedAI, an organization founded to "create a more robust, responsive, and inclusive future for AI."Ĭarson shared with us the "Hack the Future" theme of the challenge - to bring together "a large number of unrelated and diverse testers in one place at one time with varied backgrounds, some having no experience, while others have been deep in AI for years, and producing what is expected to be interesting and useful results." The line to participate was always longer than the time available, that is, there was more interest than capability. It was perhaps the first public incarnation of the White House's May 2023 wish to see large language models (LLMs) stress-tested by red teams. My researcher, Barbara Schluetter, and I had come to see the Generative Red Team Challenge, which purported to be "the first instance of a live hacking event of a generative AI system at scale." So maybe you should think about security a little bit more.The 2023 DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas was billed as the world's largest hacker event, focused on areas of interest from lockpicking to hacking autos (where the entire brains of a vehicle were reimagined on one badge-sized board) to satellite hacking to artificial intelligence. “And trying to get big business and the federal government and manufacturers to understand that if you put something in my hands I’m going to take it apart and figure out how it works. The fact that you can manufacture a device, a piece of software, and not care about security as long as it’s marketed well.These people get ahold of it and just break it wide open,” Chuck said. Because if you don’t here then in six months we’re going to read about it in your magazine.”ĭefcon, he said, is “about opening people’s eyes to the intrinsic insecurity of the entire IT realm. But the IT guy in me thinks someone should be talking about this. “I’m mixed, because I’m a really low-level Fed, so that in my thinks you shouldn’t be talking about this. “The ones that begin with ‘This is illegal. I asked what were the most interesting talks he’d seen. “When they don’t start just spouting off about what they know and try to brag about how smart they are.” It’s just the way they move and the general feeling you get and the confidence that some of these guys project,” Chuck said. “That’s why you pay cash only and you get a badge that just says ‘Human.’ There’s everything from DOD entities, to NSA agents, to cybercriminals and everything in between.” Then last year, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s massive leak exposing NSA surveillance, conference founder and patriarch Dark Tangent (his hacker handle) wrote an open letter asking Feds to sit out the event so everyone could cool off. Not all of them are covert two years ago former head of the National Security Agency Gen. Feds, especially in the post-Snowden era, are not especially popular, though the place is rumored to be “crawling” with them, as one long-time attendee put it to me. I spent the weekend reporting at Defcon and though I never went to claim a prize-I don’t think journalists are invited to play anyway-I do think I found a Fed.Īs a conference that hosts speeches on topics like how to cyber-hijack a jetliner, Defcon takes pride in skirting the edge of legality. At Defcon, the annual hacker conference that met over the weekend in Las Vegas, attendees play a semi-official game called “Spot the Fed.” The object is to identify who among the rabble of computer geeks and hackers is an employee of the federal government.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |