[Dailydave] DIRNSA

Dave Aitel dave at immunityinc.com
Thu Jul 12 12:37:29 EDT 2012


So here is DIRNSA at AEI talking about, well, everything.
http://bcove.me/r7tgbw0w . At first I was like "this is super lame - why
is he going on about BackTrack and malware signatures?" But there's this
thing about American spooks Neal Stephenson points out so well
<http://www.euskalnet.net/larraorma/crypto/slide41.html> in
Cryptonomicon, probably something they stole from the Brits, which is
that they play as stupid as they think you can handle at all times. If
you get three dudes from an intel background together, they'll each go
in a circle pointing out how incapable, uninformed, and generally
useless they are compared to everyone else there.

So if you ask DIRNSA to give a speech, what you get  is he'll point out
that yes, he learned how to read, and at one point managed to boot a
couple VM's and own one of them.

And once you get over that, you can listen to his actual talk, which is
pretty good really. It's prepared, of course, but there's some vision in
it deep down (which I think will go unrealized), of a world where the
NSA is a managed security service provider that operates at wire speed
to do its job. During the questions session he demonstrates a rather
interesting and subtle understanding of war and things that are not war
but still change state behavior ("Diplomatic, economic, informational")
is his best phrase imo.

An interesting counterpoint to DIRNSA's talk is Bruce Schneier's RSA
talk here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrjgXHAYvxk which is really
better titled "what the hell happened in the last ten years while I was
asleep?!?" but is worth watching.

-dave


-- 
INFILTRATE - the world's best offensive information security conference.
April 2013 in Miami Beach
www.infiltratecon.com

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