Last weekend I was at Toorcon 11 in San Diego mostly because of my interest in botnets and malware. Just some brief cliff notes from the conference I thought were semi-interesting:

Koobface is absolutely the coolest virus/trojan ever. Whatever dev team is maintaining that project is genius. For instance, to create accounts they’ll download a captcha from one infected user, show it to another infected user telling them they need to type it in to continue using their computer, and then they’ll take that response and send it back over to the first infected user to create an account.

Another hilarious thing is a guy by the name of Dancho Danchev has been doing research on koobface, and they mess with him all the time. For instance, they redirected facebook’s IP space to his blog.

Lastly, koobface spoofs as a Flash updater to get people to install it. Pretty interesting way to get someone to download something. It’s something I’d even fall for probably.

A little bit on Malware installs was discussed along with some interesting tools.

SDDownloader is software you manage to get installed on a users machine and it allows you to install more software (aka payperinstall toolbars) with it.

Although not new:
VirusTotal – does full virus scans on anything you upload to it via a bunch of commercial and free virus scanners.

Looks like I’ll be going to Affiliate Summit West from January 11th to the 14th.  If you want to meet up, throw me a message on AIM at : YRM (yes 3 characters)

This conference has been less than what I anticipated it to be as far as the conference sessions go. Most of the information I learned wasn’t geared toward the secondary ticket broker niche at all (which is what the sessions sounded like they were going to cover), but more geared toward large sized ticket companies trying to sell you on new technology which actually was anti-ticket broker. For instance, their were mobile companies talking about paperless tickets on mobile phones. Basically the idea is a venue sends you your ticket on your mobile phone with a bar code which you then show to someone scanning tickets at the entrance to get in. As they were talking, I thought it’d be funny to connect to some of the bluetooth phones around me with my phone and remind myself how retarded of an idea mobile tickets are. Then I imagined for 10 minutes how funny it would be if I was able to get access to the mobile guys phones via bluetooth and show them their own tickets. I decided against this as I figured it probably wouldn’t go over too well if I outted them in front of a bunch of people and I’m assuming they were a little bit smarter than that and probably disabled their bluetooth.

In another session some of the bigger CEOs/Presidents of primary and secondary markets (RazorGator, Stubhub/eBay, Tickets.com) were getting grilled by the attendees when they asked for questions. One of the funniest ones was some big ticket CEO/President or whatever was trying to justify the reasons why small time secondary ticket brokers should give them their customer data, that somehow that’s a win/win/win for everyone because they are helping them and the venue create a better fan experience. In actuality, we all know the big ticket brokers just want the information so they can basically jack the secondary ticket broker’s customers. I’d say that’s a win/lose/LOSE.

With all that said, my personal view on the state of the secondary ticket industry is that it will always continue to exist however the margins are going to get smaller and smaller as years progress. Whether or not this is something I’m interested in building out is another matter. So we’ll see.

Oh and somehow I managed to split the pot with one other person for the Ticket Summit poker tournament. How I ended up coming in 1st/2nd place out of 60 people I have no idea.

I finished up the Last HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in New York today. Overall it was an interesting experience. I’ve never seen so many people wearing all black in my life or with crazy piercings. I really stood out in my royal blue t-shirt and short haircut.

With that said, a few of the conferences I went to included Adam Savage (the guy from MythBusters) who talked about his OCD with creating things which was hilarious and  Kevin Mitnick (the infamous hacker from the 90s who went to jail for like 5 years).

I also watched Emmanuel Goldstein (alias for Eric Gordon Corley and founder of 2600 magazine) do some social engineering over the phone. It’s crazy how easy it is to get information from people over the phone about things you shouldn’t be able to get information for. His conference consisted of him making real life phone calls including a call to an airline to see if anyone with the lastname “Johnson” was on any flights coming into New York. Another was a limo company in the area who gave a list of female “Johnson”s who were expecting pickups at the airport which included first names. I believe the purpose of this was to call back at a later time and change the flight and name of the person to be picked up for a free limo ride. They also called the Ritz Carlton as an extermination service named Last Hope Exterminators and tried to get them to admit they had bed bugs. This resulted in them talking to security to allow them to bring their vehicle in past security. It was really a joke how easy some of these people just went right along with helping Emmanual Goldstein out.

There was also a great talk by Steven Rambam a private investigator who was actually arrested right before his 2006 speech at HOPE. A few of the interesting things he spoke about were the fact that facial recognition is becoming very prevaliant and will be everywhere in the not too distant future. He also talked about how people who use facebook, myspace, or any social networking site and giving away information about themselves that could only be used against them, how every digital image a person takes has an ID of the camera that took it which actually can be matched up to other pictures you take. So say you take a picture of yourself, and then you decide to kill a kitty (a lil extreme) and put it all over the net anonymously. Someone could match the ID of your self photo and the ID on the kitty picture and find out who you are.Lastly, he spoke about how easy it is to get all your information (social, address, etc.) just from a phone # which takes him about 10 minutes. So privacy is a total joke in the hands of someone who knows where to look.

The Last HOPE was pretty awesome and very informative, I plan to go back if they decide to have another.

List of Events I’ll be attending through July/August. If you plan to be at any of these, throw me a message on AIM at “YRM” and I’ll buy you a beer.

The Last Hope – New York – July 18th – 20th

This is basically a hacker conference and will probably be somewhat over my head. I’m mostly looking to network with people at this conference, and I’ve never been to New York so it should be a great experience and a lot of fun.

Ticket Summit – Las Vegas – July 23rd – 25th

I got into event tickets a few years back and made ok money. Now the market is bigger than ever. I’m pursuing the ticket route because I already know it’s hot. Hoping to meet a lot of great contacts here and get business rollin’.

HostingCon – Chicago – July 28-30th

Trying to negotiate a few deals for racks.

Defcon – Las Vegas – Aug 7th-10th 6PM

It was either this or dropping $$ for Media Breakaway (I no longer work with CPAEmpire). Then I asked myself, where else can you get your laptop hacked, learn to lockpick, and meet 1337 h4x0rs.

Affiliate Summit East – Boston – Late Aug 10th – 12th

If you haven’t been to an affiliate summit, you need to go, it’s a blast.

Search Engine Strategies – San Jose – Aug 18th-22nd

Not really that interested in this one, but since it’s local for me I can’t really go wrong.

Today there was a small get together (around 20 people) of PPC marketers in San Francisco put together by Wes Mahler the Tracking202/Prosper202 guy. I have to say it was pretty exciting to meet like-minded people in the bay area. If you live near San Francisco and are even just a newb getting into PPC or are an expert you’ll meet a range of people at this meetup. I highly recommend you go to the next one. You can find details at www.meetup202.com. I learned quite a bit today from quite a few people, and I ended up giving out all my business cards. I even think I ended up accidently giving out business cards of other people that I had stashed behind my business cards because I noticed I’m missing a few cards I knew I got. I didn’t gather any contact information from people other than business cards so please if you’re reading this somehow e-mail me (it’s on my card) or aim me at: YRM (Yes, 3 characters)

I just had an exhibitor pass.This is the biggest conference I’ve been to thus far for online advertising vendors.  It’s a great place to go if you’re looking to start a business or grow your business as the amount of contacts I met there were insane. Every aspect of online advertising was covered from offshoring, public relations, internet law, affiliate networks, magazines, etc.