Sumit Dhar

InQUIZitivePaladion Security Summit - 2013

Question:

According to an article in The New York Times, it the output of a joint project called Operation Olympic Games. Brought to limelight by Sergey Ulasen of a small company VirusBlokAda, it was initially named W32.Temphid. Consisting of two files: .stub and mrxnet.sys, it phoned home using either www.mypremierfutbol.com or www.todaysfutbol.com

What are we talking about?

Note: One word hint if all teams agree

Answer:

StuxnetStuxnet is a computer worm discovered in June 2010 that is believed to have been created by United States and Israel agencies to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.

Question:

In mid-1980s, Friedhelm Hillebrand the chairman of the Special Mobile Group at the European Telecommunications Standards Institut (ETSI) sat alone in his room in Germany and started typing random sentences. He did this for a long time and later analyzed the average length of sentences.

What did Hillebrand find as the average length of sentences and how did he use this number?

Answer:

Friedhelm Hillebrand found that the average length of a sentence was 160 characters. This became the default length of a single SMS.

Question:

It was an electro-mechanical device invented and patented by the German electrical engineer Arthur Scherbius in 1918. Initial models were sold commercially but later models were adopted exclusively by military and government services of several countries.

What?

Answer:

The Enigma Machine It was used extensively by Nazis for encryption during World War II.

Question:

The word is of Greek origin and means concealed writing. One of the earliest recorded instances of this was highlighted by Herodotus who narrated how a message warning Greece of Persian attack was tattooed on the shaved head of a slave, hidden by the hair that grew afterwards and exposed by shaving the head again.

What?

Answer:

Steganography

Question:

This group originated in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan. Members are often seen in public wearing stylized Guy Fawkes masks. They have been involved in various attacks like Chanology, Payback is a Bitch, Avenge Assange and Operation Darknet. Members commonly use the tagline:

We are ______We are LegionWe do not forgiveWe do not forget Expect us

Which group?

Answer:

AnonymousIt is a hacktivist group with decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives

Question*:

qrpff is a seven line Perl script created by Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz of the MIT. The name itself is rot-13 encoding of the function the script performs. #!/usr/bin/perl -w# 531-byte qrpff-fast, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz# arguments: title key bytes in least to most-significant order $_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;$t=255;@t=map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=($m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;$t^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%162?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271);if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h==5;$_==unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d>>8^($f=$t&($d>>12^$d>>4^$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e>>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*8^$q<<6))<<9,$_=$t[$_]^(($h>>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval

What does qrpff do?

Answer*:

DeCSSQrpff helps break Content Scramble System (CSS), the encryption used in DVDs

Question:

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has called it the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. According to Assange, this system maintains the most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other and accessible to the U.S. intelligence.

What was Julian Assange talking about?

Answer:

Facebook

Question*:

Harald Gormsson was a King of Denmark and Norway; having ruled this region from c. 958 to 970. He gained a nickname due to his love to blueberries which stained his teeth. A particular communication protocol is named after him ostensibly due to his abilities to make diverse factions communicate with each other.

What protocol?

Answer*:

Bluetooth

Question:

It was started in 1993 by Jeff Moss as a farewell party in Las Vegas for a friend. However, his friend had to leave earlier. Instead of letting the preparations go waste, Jeff invited his other friends to the party. While it was meant to be a one-time event, Jeff started receiving mails to host a similar party again. He did so and named it after a term from the movie War Games related to defense readiness condition of US Armed Forces.

What did Jeff start?

Hint: Available if majority agrees

Answer:

DefCon

It is one of the world's largest annual hacker conventions, held every year in Las Vegas

Question:

They are pre-computed tables for reversing cryptographic hash functions. Application of earlier, simpler algorithm explored by Martin Hellman in his paper “A Cryptanalytic Time – Memory Tradeoff” they were first used by Philippe Oechslin in his program Ophcrack.

What?

Answer:

Rainbow Tables

Question:

He used various identities on the net: one being TheTrueHOOHA (on ArsTechnica forums) and the other being Verax.

His story is the basis of movies Classified (a crowd funded movie) and Verax (a low budget flick based on his short stay in Hong Kong).

He was responsible for revealing the existence of the program designated as US-984XN as well as others like Boundless Informant and Tempora.

Who?

Answer:

Edward SnowdenAmerican computer specialist and a former NSA contractor who disclosed details of the PRISM program.

Question:

This magazine, published once every quarter, was co-founded by David Ruderman and Eric Coley. Its name comes from a phreaker discovery in 1960s that transmission of a particular frequency over a long distance trunk call gave one access to operator mode & effectively allowed user’s admin access.

Which magazine are we talking about? (Or just give me the frequency)

Answer:

2600: The Hacker QuarterlyIt is a hacker publication that specializes in publishing technical information on a variety of subjects including telephone switching systems, Internet protocols and services, as well as general news concerning the computer / hacking underground.

Question:

It was first released in 1997 in Phrack magazine Issue 51 by Gordon Lyon. The software did not have a version number because the developer had no plans to release any future versions.

The software become very popular and a few years later, Gordon quit his job at Netscape / AOL to concentrate fully on this software. Trinity is seen using this software in The Matrix Reloaded and it was later seen in Live Free or Die Hard and Bourne Ultimatum.

Which software?

Note: Hint if all teams agree

Answer:

Nmap by Gordon Fyodor LyonNmap is a security scanner used to discover hosts and services on a computer network, thus creating a "map" of the network.

Question:

Khalil Shreateh was born in Jerusalem and raised in Yatta (an agricultural town) in Palestine. He completed a degree in information systems at Al-Quds Open University while working at a construction site.

He was recently in news for something he did. What did Khalil do?

Answer:

Khalil discovered a vulnerability in Facebook and exploited that to post to Mark Zuckerberg’s wall.

Question:

This term made its first appearance in 1987 during the beta testing of IBM’s OS/2. Developers at Lattice Inc, were porting their tools to OS/2 and often came across error screens due to bugs in the operating system. As a result of the error screen, the system became unusable.

While describing the situation to IBM, they used a phrase to describe the error screen and that term has become wildly popular since then.

What phrase did the developers of Lattice use?

Answer:

Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)

Question:

This term refers to phenomenon of a website becoming virtually unreachable because too many people are trying to access it after it is mentioned in an article on a popular technology news site.

What term?

Answer:

Slashdot effect or Slashdotted

Question:

It is a barrier that is used to prevent the spread of a blaze between buildings or in a vehicle between the engine and the passenger compartment.

A passive protection system, it is often made of concrete blocks or in the case of vehicles from a metal coated with absorber polymers.

What name is given to these barriers?

Answer:

Firewalls

Question:

This website was founded by Gottfrid Svartholm (anakata), Peter Sunde (brokep) and Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) in 2001. In 2012, Google revealed that it had received over 6000 formal requests to remove this site from its index.

Additionally, the founders have been involved in multiple cases involving the legality of the content on their website. Given the challenges around legality of their operations, they evaluated buying their own country (the micronation of Sealand) and running operations from there.

Which website?

Answer:

The Pirate Bay

Question:

In Greek mythology, he is a centaur that tried to steal the wife of Heracles. This enraged Heracles who killed the centaur using a poisoned arrow.

When Renaud Deraison, the author of this security software, was looking for a name for his software, he randomly selected a page in a mythology encyclopedia and landed on the story of this centaur. He liked the name of the centaur and decided to name his software after the centaur.

What software?

Answer:

Nessus

Question:

On August 4, 1922 all telephones across entire US and Canada were unreachable for a minute.

Why?

Answer:

As a mark of respect during Alexander Graham Bell’s funeral, telephony services were shut down for a minute

Question:

Microsoft Windows and IBM OS/2 were two competing operating systems and released around the same time.

While Microsoft Windows was finally the winner, IBM used the following quote by a famous person to promote their product:

“I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.”

Whose quote?

Answer:

Bill Gates

Microsoft and IBM were earlier working together on OS/2 when Bill Gates made this quote. However, they later parted ways and IBM used Bill Gates quote for gaining maximum publicity

Question:

An initial version of this software was released in September 2002. Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and Paul Syverson presented at the 13th USENIX security symposium in 2004. It was originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory with the primary purpose of protecting government communication. Later it was sponsored by EFF, US State Department and National Science Foundation among others.

What software are we talking about?

Answer:

Tor

Question:

This video game was originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov at the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow in 1984.

It holds multiple records including “Most Ported Video Game” and the “Game with the Most Official and Unofficial Variants”. Due to their shape, the components of this game are referred as I, J, L, O, S, T, and Z.

What extremely famous game are we talking about?

Answer:

Tetris

Question:

In late 1990s, Gerald Combs, a computer science graduate of the University of Missouri, was working for a small Internet service provider.

Unfortunately, the software he needed for his job did not run on Solaris / Linux and was pretty expensive. So, Gerald sat down, wrote the software that he needed and released it as an Open Source product in 1998.

However, when he changed jobs in 2006, he could no longer use the older name of the software as he did not own the copyright. He, therefore, had to release his software under a new name.

Give me either the old name or the new name of his software.

Answer:

Ethereal or Wireshark

Question:

This project was meant to displace Japanese video game makers from their dominant position in the industry.

As a result, it was code-named Project Manhattan, a reference to the outcome of the Manhattan project which ultimately resulted in the nuclear bombing of Japan. The logo of this project originally represented a nuclear radiation warning symbol.

What are we talking about?

Answer:

DirectXCollection of APIs for handling multimedia tasks on Microsoft platforms.

Question:

He is an Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist. He claims he is descended from a Taiwanese pirate and his last name is an Anglicization of Cantonese for Mr. Sang.

As a teen, he was a part of a group called International Subversives and was involved in a variety of hacking cases. Additionally, an experiment that went wrong in his teen years, resulted in his completely white hair.

He has also been voted as Australia’s most famous ethical hacker.

Who?

Answer:

Julian Assange

Question:

The first usage of this phrase (in computer literature) was observed in Kernighan's 1972 paper A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B.

This was used again in a 1974 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum Programming in C: A Tutorial and a little later in an example program in the beginning of the seminal book The C Programming Language.

What famous phrase, which all newbie programmers quickly become familiar with, are we talking about?

Answer:

Hello World

Question:

Designed by Paul Stansifer, it features the Cyrillic letter И (“I”), the Greek letter Ω (Omega), the Korean syllabic block 위 (wi), the Arabic letter و (Waw), the Chinese character 維 (Wéi), the Hindi akshar वि� (Wi) at the left, the Bangla borno উ (U) , the Hebrew letter ו (Vav), the Georgian (Vin) and at the ვuppermost left the Armenian (Vev). ՎThe empty space at the top represents the incomplete nature of the project.

What?

Answer:

Wikipedia Logo

Question:

David Smith, a programmer, fell in love with a stripper in Florida. However, sadly for David, his affections were not reciprocated.

He then sat down and created something as an ode to his love. He named his creation after the stripper.

What did David create?

Answer:

Melissa Virus

Question:

Bomis.com is an adult website and its primary source of revenue is online advertising. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and Tim Shell in 1996. They, however, used the revenue from Bomis to launch and support a more famous initiative in 2001.

What website (that we all use) are we talking about?

Answer:

Wikipedia

Question:

It began as a research project at Stanford and was initially called Backrub.

It was to be named after a very large number (10100) but a spelling error led to its current name.

Alexa, an entity that provides web traffic data, believes it to be among the top 5 most visited sites on the Internet.

What are we talking about?

Answer:

Google

Question:

The science fiction novel When H.A.R.L.I.E. was One (by David Gerrold) is the story of an artificial intelligence's relationship with his creators.

The novel includes a description of a fictional malicious computer program which performs certain functions.

What name was given by David Gerrold to that program?

Answer:

Virus

Question:

He was born to a Syrian father Abdulfattah Jandali and a Swiss American mother Joanne Carole Schieble on Feb 24th, 1955. His biological parents married in December 1955 and had a second child, the novelist Mona Simpson. He enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon but dropped out 6 months later. However, he continued auditing various creative classes at college. In 2010, Forbes listed him among to top 100 richest Americans.

Who?

Answer:

Steve Jobs

Question:

He holds a Bachelors of Science in Physics and a Masters in Computer Science. He has worked with US DoD and AT&T Bell Labs. He is currently the CTO of BT Counterpane.

Along with his wife, Karen Cooper, he has written restaurant reviews for Star Tribune. They were nominated for the Hugo Award for their Minicon 34 Restaurant Guide.

However, he is extremely famous for his achievements in a totally different field. Who are we talking about?

Answer:

Bruce Schneier

Question:

In poetry and music, the caesura denotes a break or silence in the composition. It is often depicted as // (in music) and as || (in poetry). It is believed that the caesura has inspired the design of something that we see and use very frequently on computers.

What?

Answer:

The Pause Button

Question:

The first version of this application was created by Robert McCool at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. When McCool left NCSA in mid-1994, the development stalled. Improvements were made via patches circulated through email and this led to the end result being a patchy server.

What are we talking about?

Answer:

A Patchy Server = Apache

Question:

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary uses the Monty Python story (where a group of Vikings sing a chorus of _____, ______, _______ at increasing volumes in an attempt to drown out other conversations) to explain the etymology of this word. This word is also used as a trademark for a spiced ham food product.

What is the word ?

Answer:

SPAM

Audience Question

In 1984, the advertising agency Chiat / Day was looking for an model who could wield a sledge hammer. Most models who auditioned for this ad failed. However, Anya Major, an athlete & model won the role with her ability to handle the hammer convincingly.

What iconic product advertisement did Anya Major model for?

Answer:

Apple’s iconic advertisement (titled 1984) to introduce to Macintosh.

It is believed to be one of the most influential advertisements of all times.

Audience Question

John Markoff, a journalist is best known for his work at New York Times and his book titled Takedown. The book Takedown tells the story of Tsutomu Shimomura, a computer expert, who helps FBI pursue and capture on of America's most wanted computer criminal.

Who is this computer criminal?

Answer:

Kevin Mitnick

Audience Question

It was earlier known as David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web. In March, 1994 its name was changed to the name by which we know it today.

Based on the way their database was arranged and how the site considered itself a source of truth, it was often referred to as Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.

What was the new name given to David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web?

Answer:

Yahoo!

Audience Question

This computer engineer and programmer was a part of the phone phreaking community and went by the name of Berkeley Blue.

One of early pranks that he pulled was to call the Vatican (at 4:30 in the morning) using a bluebox and claim that "I must talk to the Pope right away. This is Henry Kissinger. I must confess to my sins."

Who?

Answer:

Steve WozniakCo-founder of Apple computers along with Steve Jobs

Audience Question

Ward Cunningham was looking for a name for an application he had developed. Around the same time, he visited Hawaii and was found the name used by the airport shuttle service interesting. On further investigation, he found that the word meant “quick”. He decided to use this word for his application and today it is commonly used in the context of collaborative applications on the internet.

What application or word?

Answer:

Wiki

Therefore, an online encyclopedia developed collaboratively becomes Wikipedia

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