Black Hat 2019: The Craziest, Most Terrifying Things We Saw

The Las Vegas sun has set on another Black Hat and the myriad of hacks, attacks, and vulnerabilities it brings. We had high expectations this year and were not disappointed. We were even occasionally surprised. Here are all the great and terrifying things we saw.

- Neil J. Rubenking And Max Eddy

PHONY PHONES

Thanks to Afilias for showing us these weird devices: a group of phones that look great but are actually low-cost fakes from China. Each costs about $50, and come preloaded with malware for no extra charge! The bogus iPhone is particularly impressive. It runs a highly modified version of Android that’s a dead ringer for iOS. It even has a carefully made fake compass app, albeit one that always points up.

MISSILES FOR MALWARE

Security researcher Mikko Hypponen pondered the consequences of cyberwar becoming an actual shooting war in his presentation at Black Hat. It’s an important issue in this age of state-sponsored hackers and Russian election meddling. He also presented audiences with the best way to describe the job of a security expert: “What we do is like Tetris. When you’re successful, it disappears. When you screw up, it piles up.”

SPREADING IN SOFTWARE

How many ways can malicious software infect other code? Let us count the ways! No, really: count them. That’s what some researchers did. They expected to find a handful of ways but instead came up with 20-plus variations.

DON’T RELY TOO MUCH ON GPS

GPS is great; it helps you get where you need to go and you don’t have to keep a musty atlas in your car anymore. But Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) like GPS are easily spoofed, and that’s a problem if you’re designing an autonomous vehicle that relies too heavily on GNSS. In one Black Hat talk, we saw that kind of scary, wonky things happen to a driverless car when you mess with navigation signals.

A SPECTRE OF SPECTRE WITH SWAPGS