A Black Hat Conference is nothing if not quirky as security geeks try every stunt possible to show what a clueless world we live in when it comes to security. Anyway, here are some such moments from this week's event:
* When University of Luxembourg graduate student Ralf-Philipp Weinmann fired up his his laptop/fake GSM base station to lure iPhone users into joining his fake network, it sent a message to some iPhones held by audience members, who were amazed. Though the demo did not go entirely as planned, Weinmann later admitted he was surprised, too, that his trick message went out and hit the vulnerable iPhones. ... Watch it with that fake GSM base station thing.

* The advance billing for a talk by Itzhak Avraham, CTO at Zimperium, said he was going to "demo a vulnerable application that is in current Android and can be used for remote attacks(!)." But Avraham had to announce to his audience that he'd gotten a letter two days earlier threatening him with legal action if he talked about that, so he didn't. When later asked who was threatening to sue, he declined to reveal the name of the application vendor but said, "It's not Google! It's not Google's fault!" Just for the record ...

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