Three Reporters Tossed Out of Black Hat

Three reporters from Global Security Mag thought it'd be funny to sniff network traffic of other reporters at the recent Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. The stunt backfired on the trio, who got booted out and also were banned from attending the DEFCON conference.

According to stunt victim Brian Price, a journalist at eWeek, the three men involved in perpetrating the attack are Dominique Jouniot, Mauro Israel, and Marc Brami. The trio sat in the press room and sniffed traffic on the wired network (which is allocated to members of the press) trying to collect passwords.

They snagged one of Price's passwords, which he had used to connect to a remote eWeek application while in the press room. The trio claimed to have also obtained a password belonging to a CNET reporter.

After gathering password info the trio then tried to get conference officials to post the information on the 'Wall of Shame' (a source of severe embarrassment) but were rebuked and informed that hacking the private press network was a no-no. The trio then had their conference badges confiscated and were summarily tossed out of the conference.

According to a story at CNET, the password allegedly stolen from one of their reporters was incorrect. According to that same story, Global Security Mag director Mark Brami said regarding the incident, "It's not good for my magazine, but also it is not so good for Black Hat...maybe they lost a good supporter. For us, it was like a joke."

Let's see... three 'reporters' camp out in the press room, manipulate the network so that they have access to people's private information - which they proceed to steal - and somehow that's supposed to be a funny joke?

Information security is the task of protecting data. Theft is the act of taking something without permission of the owner. According to Dictionary.com a sociopath is "a person whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience."

So there we have it.