Top hacker shows us how it's done | Pablos Holman | TEDxMidwest

Summary

In this TEDx Talk, renowned hacker Pablos Holman shares a glimpse into the world of hacking, demonstrating the potential vulnerabilities in everyday technology. From manipulating hotel TV networks to hacking into Bluetooth traffic at conferences, Holman's talk highlights the often unexpected ways in which our devices can be compromised. He showcases various projects he's worked on, including innovative solutions for cyber-security issues and unconventional approaches to tackling big problems like malaria. Holman's presentation is a humorous and provocative exploration of technology, security, and innovation.

Highlights

• Holman finds entertaining ways to explore the vulnerabilities of hotel TVs 📺.
• He demonstrates the amusing 'Sniper Yagi' for long-range network surveillance 🎯.
• Showcases a playful, viral MySpace hack by Samy Kamkar to gain friends 😂.
• Reveals the hidden security issues with 'secure' credit cards in a live demo 💳.
• Shares inventive mosquito-killing laser technology as an out-of-the-box solution 🔫.

Key Takeaways

• Hacking hotel TVs can be more about exploration than free entertainment 📺.
• Pablos Holman emphasizes the sheer curiosity driving hackers' discoveries 🔍.
• Samy Kamkar's MySpace worm demonstrated the viral potential of coding on social platforms ⚡.
• Innovative hacking techniques can uncover unexpected security flaws 💡.
• Holman's laser-based mosquito defense showcases unconventional approaches to big problems 🦟.
• Hackers' mindset can be applied to diverse fields, turning curiosity into impactful solutions 🚀.

Overview

Pablos Holman's TEDx talk gives us a peek into the whimsical, exploratory nature of hacking. He opens with a curious case of hacking hotel TVs, not just to watch free movies, but to understand the technological intricacies beneath everyday electronics. The conversation is spiced up with laughter as Holman recounts tales of creative hacking endeavors, flipping the way we perceive our interactions with technology.

Throughout the presentation, Holman provides amusing yet alarming demonstrations of security weaknesses, from manipulating Bluetooth traffic at a conference to showcasing a credit card hack live on stage. These examples underline a hacker's potential to uncover the vulnerabilities within our daily tech. His anecdotes about MySpace hacks and unlocking cars with universal remotes paint a lively picture of hacking as both a playful pastime and a serious pursuit of knowledge.

The talk takes an inspiring turn as Holman illustrates how hacking ideology can lead to groundbreaking solutions to global challenges. He details a creative project aimed at combating malaria using laser technology to target mosquitoes, showcasing how a hacker's mindset—grounded in curiosity and innovation—can engineer solutions beyond conventional means. Holman's narrative blends humor with insight, urging us to reimagine the capacities of technology and human ingenuity.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Introduction to Hacking in Hotel Rooms The chapter titled 'Introduction to Hacking in Hotel Rooms' explores the unconventional ways a hacker might find entertainment in a hotel room. Unlike a typical TV at home, the television in a hotel room is part of a network, making it a point of interest for tech-savvy individuals seeking intrigue beyond standard entertainment options.
• 01:30 - 03:30: The TV and Wi-Fi Hacking The chapter titled 'The TV and Wi-Fi Hacking' discusses how the speaker uses a device to manipulate TVs and Wi-Fi. By plugging an infrared transceiver into a computer, the speaker can send codes like those from a TV remote. This capability allows them to watch movies and play video games for free. The hacking isn't limited to their TV at home; they can also perform these actions in a hotel room, highlighting the potential broader applications and implications of such technologies.
• 04:00 - 05:00: MySpace Adventures and Samy's Story The chapter titled 'MySpace Adventures and Samy's Story' humorously discusses the potential security vulnerabilities in hotel room TV systems. It highlights how someone can potentially control and observe what a hotel guest is doing if they're using TV-based web services. This includes everything from web browsing to more sensitive activities like funds transfers, underlying the privacy risks associated with such technology. The speaker reflects on the various intriguing and potentially compromising scenarios that could be witnessed through such unauthorized access.
• 06:00 - 08:30: Lock Picking and Car Key Hacking The chapter "Lock Picking and Car Key Hacking" begins with a humorous note, with the speaker joking about having control over whether an audience member watches 'Disney or porn' at the hotel they're staying at. This sets a lighthearted tone for the discussion that follows. The speaker then introduces a project called 'Hackerbot', which was developed to analyze the security properties of wireless networks. The 'Hackerbot' is a robot designed to drive around, locate Wi-Fi users, and display their passwords on a screen. This innovative project highlights both the vulnerabilities present in wireless networks and the inventive approach taken by the creators to explore these security weaknesses.
• 09:00 - 12:30: USB Drives and Credit Card Vulnerabilities The chapter discusses vulnerabilities associated with USB drives and credit cards, showcasing a project called 'Sniper Yagi' designed for long-range password sniffing. This project illustrates passive surveillance capabilities by mapping a conference through strategically placed computers in hotel rooms, demonstrating the potential risks of wireless network monitoring.
• 13:00 - 16:00: SSL Protocol and Intro to Malaria Research In this chapter, the speaker discusses an experiment conducted during a conference where Bluetooth traffic was monitored and logged from attendees' phones and laptops. The logged data allowed the creation of a map showing the movements and interactions of individual participants, including notable figures like Kim Cameron, the Chief Privacy Architect at Microsoft. The experiment highlighted privacy concerns regarding Bluetooth traffic tracking.
• 16:00 - 17:30: Mosquito and Malaria Research with Lasers Chapter Title: Mosquito and Malaria Research with Lasers Chapter Summary: The chapter begins with a humorous interaction regarding cellphones where the speaker, Palbos Holman, is disrupted by a phone call, and a voice mail indicates 100 unheard messages. This introduction may serve as an engaging way to transition into the main topic of the chapter, which is likely discussing innovative approaches to addressing malaria using lasers, although specific details about the research are not provided in the transcript snippet.
• 17:30 - 19:00: Intellectual Ventures Lab and Conclusion The chapter titled 'Intellectual Ventures Lab and Conclusion' begins with a humorous moment involving a voicemail mishap, where PH accidentally navigates into Brad's voicemail without successfully leaving a message. This sets a light-hearted tone as the group decides to move on to other topics due to time constraints. Mention of social media platform MySpace indicates a nostalgic look back or a reference to technology use and evolution. Overall, the chapter touches upon the convergence of personal errors and advancements in tech or social media, leading to a broader conclusion or reflection.

Top hacker shows us how it's done | Pablos Holman | TEDxMidwest Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Transcriber: Bob Prottas Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo So this is a hotel room, kind of like the one I'm staying in. I get bored sometimes. A room like this has not a lot to offer for entertainment. But for a hacker, it gets a little interesting because that television is not like the television in your home, it's a node on a network. Right?
• 00:30 - 01:00 That means I can mess with it. If I plug a little device like this into my computer, it's an infrared transceiver, I can send the codes that the TV remote might send and some other codes. So what? Well, I can watch movies for free. (Laughter) That doesn't matter to me so much, but I can play video games too. Hey, but what's this? I can not only do this for my TV in my hotel room,
• 01:00 - 01:30 I can control your TV in your hotel room. (Laughter) So I can watch you if you're checking out with one of these, you know, TV based registration things, if you're surfing the web on your hotel TV, I can watch you do it. Sometimes it's interesting stuff. Funds transfer. Really big funds transfers. You never know what people might want to do while they're surfing the web from their hotel room.
• 01:30 - 02:00 (Laughter) The point is I get to decide if you're watching Disney or porn tonight. Anybody else staying at the Affinia hotel? (Laughter) This is a project I worked on when we were trying to figure out the security properties of wireless networks; it's called the "Hackerbot". This is a robot we've built that can drive around and find Wi-Fi users, drive up to them and show them their passwords on the screen. (Laughter)
• 02:00 - 02:30 We just wanted to build a robot, but we didn't know what to make it do, so - We made the pistol version of the same thing. This is called the "Sniper Yagi". It's for your long-range password sniffing action, about a mile away I can watch your wireless network. This is a project I worked on with Ben Laurie to show passive surveillance. So what it is, is a map of the conference called "Computers, Freedom and Privacy". And this conference was in a hotel, and what we did is we, you know, put a computer in each room of the conference
• 02:30 - 03:00 that logged all the Bluetooth traffic. So as everybody came and went with their phones and laptops we were able to just log that, correlate it, and then I can print out a map like this for everybody at the conference. This is Kim Cameron, the Chief Privacy Architect at Microsoft. (Laughter) Unbeknownst to him, I got to see everywhere he went. And I can correlate this and show who he hangs out with (phone dialing) when he got bored, (phone dialing) hangs out in the lobby with somebody.
• 03:00 - 03:30 Anybody here use cellphones? (Laughter) (Phone ringing) So my phone is calling - (Ringing) calling - Voice mail: You have 100 messages. Palbos Holman: Uh oh! VM: First unheard message - PH: Where do I press -
• 03:30 - 04:00 VM: Message skipped. First skipped message. PH: Uh oh! VM: Main menu. To listen to your - You have pressed an incorrect key - You have two skipped messages. Three saved messages. Goodbye. PH: Uh oh! So we're in Brad's voice mail. (Laughter) And I was going to record him a new message, but I seem to have pressed an invalid key, so we're going to move on. And I'll explain how that works some other day because we're short on time. Anybody here used MySpace?
• 04:00 - 04:30 MySpace users? Oh! Used to be popular. It's kind of like Facebook. This guy, a buddy of ours Samy, was trying to meet chicks on MySpace which I think is what it used to be good for. And what he did is he had a page on MySpace about him. It lists all your friends, and that's how you know somebody's cool is that they have a lot of friends on MySpace. Well, Samy didn't have any friends. He wrote a little bit of Javascript code that he put in his page, so that whenever you look at his page it would just automagically add you as his friend.
• 04:30 - 05:00 And it would skip the whole acknowledgement response protocol saying "Is Samy really your friend?" But then it would copy that code onto your page, so that whenever anybody looked at your page it would automatically add them as Samy's friend too. (Laughter) And it would change your page to say that "Samy is your hero." (Laughter) So in under 24 hours, Samy had over a million friends on MySpace. (Laughter) Hey, he just finished serving 3-years probation for that.
• 05:00 - 05:30 (Laughter) Even better, Christopher Abad, this guy, another hacker, also trying to meet chicks on MySpace but having spotty results. Some of these dates didn't work out so well, so what Abad did is he wrote a little bit of code to connect MySpace to Spam Assassin, which is an open source spam filter. It works just like the spam filter in your email. You train it by giving it some spam
• 05:30 - 06:00 train it by giving it a little bit of legitimate email, and it tries to use artificial intelligence to work out the difference. Right? Well, he just trained it on profiles from girls he dated and liked as legitimate email. Profiles from girls he dated and not liked, as spam, and then ran it against every profile on MySpace. (Laughter) Out spits girls you might like to date. What I say about Abad is, I think, there's like three startups here. I don't know why we need Match.com, when we can have Spam dating?
• 06:00 - 06:30 You know this is innovation. He's got a problem, he found a solution. Does anybody use these - bleep - keys for opening your car remotely? They're popular in, well, maybe not Chicago, OK. So kids these days will drive through a Wal-Mart parking lot clicking open, open, open, bloop. Eventually you find another Jetta or whatever just like yours, maybe a different color, that uses the same key code. Kids will just loot it, lock it up and go.
• 06:30 - 07:00 Your insurance company will roll over on you because there's not evidence of a break-in. For one manufacturer we figured out how to manipulate that key so that it will open every car from that manufacturer. (Laughter) There is a point to be made about this which I barely have time for, but it's that your car is now a PC, your phone is also a PC, your toaster, if it is not a PC, soon will be. Right? And I'm not joking about that. And the point of that is that when that happens
• 07:00 - 07:30 you inherit all the security properties and problems of PC's. And we have a lot of them. So keep that in mind, we can talk more about that later. Anybody use a lock like this on your front door? OK, good. I do too. This is a Schlage lock. It's on half of the front doors in America. I brought one to show you. So this is my Schlage lock. This is a key that fits the lock, but isn't cut right, so it won't turn it.
• 07:30 - 08:00 Anybody here ever tried to pick locks with tools like this? All right, got a few, few nefarious lock pickers. Well, it's for kids with OCD. You've got to put them in there, and finick with them, spend hours getting the finesse down to manipulate the pins. You know, for the ADD kids in the house there's an easier way. I put my little magic key in here, I put a little pressure on there to turn it, (Tapping) smack it a few times with this special mallet and I just picked the lock. We're in.
• 08:00 - 08:30 It's easy. And in fact, I don't really know much more about this than you do. It's really, really easy. I have a keychain I made of the same kind of key for every other lock in America. And if you're interested, I bought a key machine so that I can cut these keys and I made some for all of you guys. (Laughter) (Applause) So my gift to you, come afterwards and I will show you how to pick a lock and give you one of these keys
• 08:30 - 09:00 you can take home and try it on your door. Anybody used these USB thumb drives? Yeah, print my Word document, yeah! They're very popular. Mine works kind of like yours. You can print my Word document for me. But while you're doing that, invisibly and magically in the background it's just making a handy backup of your My Documents folder, and your browser history and cookies and your registry and password database, and all the things that you might need someday if you have a problem.
• 09:00 - 09:30 So we just like to make these things and litter them around at conferences. (Laughter) Anybody here use credit cards? (Laughter) Oh, good! Yeah, so they're popular and wildly secure. (Laughter) Well, there's new credit cards that you might have gotten in the mail with a letter explaining how it's your new "Secure credit card". Anybody get one of these? You know it's secure because it has a chip in it, an RFID tag,
• 09:30 - 10:00 and you can use these in Taxicabs and at Starbucks, I brought one to show you, by just touching the reader. Has anybody seen these before? Okay, who's got one? Bring it on up here. (Laughter) There's a prize in it for you. I just want to show you some things we learned about them. I got this credit card in the mail. I really do need some volunteers, in fact, I need one, two, three, four, five volunteers because the winners
• 10:00 - 10:30 are going to get these awesome stainless steel wallets that protect you against the problem that you guessed, I'm about to demonstrate. Bring your credit card up here and I'll show you. I want to try it on one of these awesome new credit cards. OK. Do we have a conference organizer, somebody who can coerce people into cooperating? (Laughing) It's by your own volition because - This is where the demo gets really awesome
• 10:30 - 11:00 I know you guys have never seen - (Inaudible question) What's that? They're really cool wallets made of stainless steel. Anybody else seen code on screen at TED before? Yeah, this is pretty awesome. (Laughter) OK, great I got volunteers. So who has one of these exciting credit cards? OK, here we go. I'm about to share your credit card number
• 11:00 - 11:30 only to 350 close friends. Hear the beep? That means someone's hacking your credit card. OK, what did we get? Valued customer and the credit card number and expiration date. It turns out your secure new credit card is not totally secure. Anybody else want to try yours while you're here? Man: Can you install overdraft protection? PH: Beep, let's see what we got? So we bitched about this and AMEX changed it, so it doesn't show the name anymore.
• 11:30 - 12:00 Which is progress. You can see mine, if it shows it. Yeah, it shows my name on it, that's what my Mom calls me anyway. Yours doesn't have it. Anyway, so next time you get something in the mail that says it's secure, send it to me. (Laughter) Oh wait, one of these is empty, hold on.
• 12:00 - 12:30 I think this is the one, yep, here you go. You get the one that's disassembled. All right, cool. (Applause) I still have a few minutes yet left, so I'm going to make a couple of points. (Laughter) Oh, shit. That's my subliminal messaging campaign. It was supposed to be much faster. Here's the most exciting slide ever shown at TED. This is the protocol diagram for SSL, which is the encryption system in your web browser that protects your credit card when you're sending it to Amazon and so on.
• 12:30 - 13:00 Very exciting, I know, but the point is hackers will attack every point in this protocol, right? I'm going to send two responses when the server's expecting one. I'm going to send a zero when it's expecting a one. I'm going to send twice as much data as it's expecting. I'm going to take twice as long answering as it's expecting. Just try a bunch of stuff. See where it breaks. See what falls in my lap. When I find a hole like that then I can start looking for an exploit.
• 13:00 - 13:30 This is a little more what SSL looks like to hackers, that's really boring. This guy kills a million Africans a year. It's Anopheles stephensi mosquito carrying malaria. Is this the wrong talk? (Laughter) This is a protocol diagram for malaria. So what we're doing in our lab is attacking this protocol at every point we can find. It has a very complex life cycle that I won't go into now,
• 13:30 - 14:00 but it spends some time in humans, some time in mosquitos and what I need are hackers. Because hackers have a mind that's optimized for discovery. They have a mind that's optimized for figuring out what's possible. You know, I often illustrate this by saying, If you get some random new gadget and show it to your Mom, she might say, "Well, what does this do?" And you'd say "Mom, it's a phone." And instantly, she'd would know exactly what it's for.
• 14:00 - 14:30 But with a hacker, the question is different. The question is, "What can I make this do?" I'm going to take all the screws out, and take the back off, and break it into a lot of little pieces. But then I'm going to figure out what I can build from the rubble. That's discovery, and we need to do that in science and technology to figure out what's possible. And so in the lab what I'm trying to do is apply that mindset to some of the biggest problems humans have. We work on malaria, thanks to Bill Gates, who asked us to work on it.
• 14:30 - 15:00 This is how we used to solve malaria. This is a real ad from like the 40's. We eradicated malaria in the US by spraying DDT everywhere. In the lab what we do is a lot of work to try and understand the problem. This is a high-speed video, we have a badass video camera, trying to learn how mosquitos fly. And you can see that they're more like swimming in air. We actually have no idea how they fly.
• 15:00 - 15:30 But we have a cool video camera so we - (Laughter) Yeah, it cost more than a Ferrari. Anyway we came up with some ways to take care of mosquitos. Let's shoot them down with laser beams. This is what happens when you put one of every kind of scientist in a room and a laser junky. So people thought it was funny at first, but we figured out, you know, we can build this out of consumer electronics.
• 15:30 - 16:00 It's using the CCD from a webcam, the laser from a Blu-ray burner, the laser galvo is from a laser printer. We do motion detection on a GPU processor like you might find in video game system. It's all stuff that follows Moore's law. So it's actually not going to be that expensive to do it. The idea is that we would put a perimeter of these laser systems around a building or a village and just shoot all the mosquitos on their way in to feed on humans. And we might want to do that for your backyard.
• 16:00 - 16:30 We could also do it to protect crops. Our team is right now working on characterizing what they need to do the same thing for the pest that has wiped out about two thirds of the Orange groves in Florida. So people laughed at first. This is a video of our system working. We are tracking mosquitos live as they fly around. Those crosshairs are put there by our computer. It just watches them, finds them moving
• 16:30 - 17:00 and then it aims a laser at them to sample their wing beat frequency. Figure out from that, is this a mosquito? Is it Anopheles Stephensi? Is it female? And if all that's true then we shoot it down with lethal laser. (Laughter) So we have this working in a lab. We're working on taking that project into the field now. All this happens at the Intellectual Ventures Lab in Seattle where I work and we try and take on some of the hardest problems that humans have.
• 17:00 - 17:30 This is the money shot. You can see we just burned his wing off with a UV laser. He's not coming back. (Applause) Kind of vaporized his wing right there, yeah. They love it. I mean, you know. Never got called by PETA or anyone else. I mean, it's the perfect enemy. There's just no one coming to the rescue of mosquitos. Sometimes we overdo it. So anyway, I'm going to get off stage.
• 17:30 - 18:00 This is the Intellectual Ventures Lab where I work. Basically we use every kind of scientist and one of every tool in the world to work on crazy invention projects. Thanks. (Applause)