Hackers of all stripes gather in Downtown Brooklyn for NYU-Poly’s 2013 Cyber Security Awareness Week
Downtown Brooklyn was Ground Zero for white-hat hackers over the past week, as cyber security professionals, researchers and students gathered for the 10th annual Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW).
The conference had something for everyone, from one of the world’s biggest cyber Capture the Flag competitions, to a hardware “embedded systems” competition, a high school digital murder-mystery, career fair and Department of Homeland Security trivia quiz.
While mostly undergrads (and one high school team) played in the 36-hour Capture the Flag event, Ph.D. students competed for best published student cyber security research. One of them, Masoud Rostami from Rice University, described a new way to prevent hackers from taking over implanted medical devices (IMD) such as pacemakers, insulin pumps, defibrillators.
This topic has been much in the news lately, after former vice president Dick Cheney’s doctor told of his fears that Cheney could be assassinated by a terrorist remotely hacking into to his implanted pacemaker. While WiFi access has many positives, such as being able to update a device’s software without having to remove it from the patient’s body, Cheney’s doctor disabled remote access because the threat was too great.