Who’s hacking us? How are we (as developers) making this possible? What are some of the common flaws we’re building into software? And what exactly is “pwned” anyway?!
All these questions and more come up and get answered in the presentation I made to Developers Developers Developers! in Sydney a few months ago. Fortunately the good folks at SSW were kind enough to record and very professionally produce a number of the sessions then make them available via their SSW TV channel.
Despite the managers of the conference facility doing their best to emulate a Swedish sauna by cranking the heat up to 11, I was very happy with the way the presentation went. For those around Sydney, I’ll be giving a talk in a similar style at the Web Directions South conference next week with mostly new material.
One last thing – I need to give some credit to Mikko Hypponen for the material relating to the three sources of hackers (criminals, hacktivists and governments). I was inspired by his TED talk titled Fighting viruses, Defending the net where he refers to these threats among many other insightful observations about the online security landscape. In fact I’m inspired by most things Mikko says and the way he delivers his message so do yourself a favour and check out his material.