taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

ToorCon this year looks good. I’m not going, but I wish I’d gotten it together. There’s a couple of spam/phishing-related talks, and a data-visualisation talk by Christopher Abad; hopefully he might diverge into some of this phishing data he talks about in this First Monday paper. Dan Kaminsky’s talk looks interesting, too –

Application-layer attacks against MD5

We will show how web pages and other executable environments can be manipulated to emit arbitrarily different content with identical MD5 hashes.

Sounds like fun!

Tags: conferences, hashing, md5, security, toorcon

Spam: my slides from the presentation I gave at Toorcon 2004, ‘Spam Forensics: Reverse-Engineering Spammer Tactics’, are now up. Hope they prove enlightening ;)

Tags: engineering, forensics, hope, presentation, reverse, spam, spammer, tactics, toorcon

Travel: Toorcon was great fun! Lots of interesting conversations.

Unfortunately they had a cruddy internet connection, so I’m majorly backlogged, and can’t write about any of it just yet ;)

Tags: connection, cruddy, fun, internet, toorcon, travel

Conferences: Hey — I’m talking at ToorCon 2004 down in San Diego this weekend! Come along and check it out, if you can.

I’d better hurry up and file my presentation slides pronto ;) The topic is:

Spam Forensics: Reverse-Engineering Spammer Tactics

In this talk, I’ll discuss how the SpamAssassin project has identified reliable signatures indicating that a message is spam, by reverse-engineering spammer tactics from the spam mails themselves. I’ll also discuss several specific features that we have identified, how we found them, and why the spammers add them.

Tags: conferences, forensics, hey, presentation, pronto, reverse, spam, spammer, toorcon, topic, weekend