Welcome to Def Con 24, the annual hacker conference that brings security pros, hackers, and federal agents all under one roof.
Since there is no pre-registration and almost everything is handled in cash, the organizers eventually ran out of the super-cool badges they give to attendees. Luckily, I got mine.
The vendor village this year featured everyone from t-shirt vendors to shops selling tools to make hacking easier. It's important to note that, while a lot of this stuff can be used for nefarious purposes, it's often used by white hat hackers to protect systems from the bad guys.
At this table, they're selling key loggers that secretly record every single keystroke entered into a computer. Penetration testing firms use these and other tools to test companies on their security so they won't get hacked in the future.
Another company called Hak5 sells plenty of penetration testing gear, like the WiFi Pineapple — a wireless router that can intercept all traffic passing through it, should a victim connect to it.
Hak5 also has this USB Rubber Ducky, which looks just like a regular thumb drive. Once plugged into a computer, it automatically loads whatever is on it, and it usually won't be picked up by antivirus protection.
And very, very old. This bad boy from Nuclear Data, Inc. was later sold to someone at the con. Computers from this company were mainly used by power plants and research labs to measure radioactivity.
Source: Chicago Tribune
... which included this one. Google, did you misplace a server? Actually, this looks like a Google Search Appliance. Companies bought these things and plugged them into their local networks to let employees search internal resources just like they'd search the web. Google finally phased it out earlier this year.
There were also medical devices for sale. With plenty of old devices in use that usually offer little security, hospitals are wide open to cyberattacks, according to a recent report.
Source: Tech Insider