KUALA LUMPUR: This year’s international security conference, HITBSecConf2009 Malaysia, will for the first time scrutinise the technology behind Web-based public services.

It will bring together some of the most respected mainstream and underground security experts to dissect attack and defence methods for public networks, in addition to the usual focus on corporate networks.

“Governments are making the interaction between their agencies and people more efficient by taking their public services online,” said Dhillon Andrew Kannabhiran, CEO of Hack In The Box (Malaysia), which organises HITBSecConf.

“This means there is an ever-increasing need to critically examine the security of these new services.”

Kannabhiran said the very technology that is making our lives easier is also exposing us to various risks, such as identity theft and the leakage of confidential information.

“It is therefore imperative to carefully scrutinise the technological foundations for public services and share the findings with the organisations that develop them, the governments that deploy them, and the people who use them,” he said.

HITBSecConf 2009, the seventh in an annual series, is scheduled to be held in the capital from Oct 5 to 8.

Hands on

This year’s conference will feature four hardcore technical training sessions on the first two days and triple-track presentations, hacking competitions and other complementing activities on the third and fourth days.

Also, government and law enforcement representatives are invited to a closed-door training session that will delve into the “Security of Asean Locks.”

Keynote speakers include Joe Grand (aka Kingpin), an electrical engineer, inventor, hardware hacker, and president of Grand Idea Studio; Rop Gonggrijp, hacker and activist; Ed Skoudis, co-founder of InGuardians, a vendor-independent information security consultancy; and the founders of WikiLeaks.org.

Gonggrijp’s presentation on insecurities within electronic voting systems should be of partocular interest, according to Kannabhiran.

“He was considered a major security threat by authorities in The Netherlands and the United States following his founding of an organisation that campaigned against the use of electronic voting systems without a voter-verified paper audit trail.

“In 2006, the group showed on Dutch TV how an electronic voting machine could easily be hacked and in May 2008, the Dutch Government decided that elections in The Netherlands would be held using paper ballots and red pencils only,” Kannabhiran said.

Another keynote that should be highly interesting is the one by the founders of Wikileaks — a website dedicated to the publication of anonymous submissions of sensitive governmental and corporate documents.

For its work, Wikileaks received the Amnesty International Award for New Media recently.

HITB Labs

This year’s Lab sessions will examine a unique, new and unconventional approach for remote keystrokes sniffing on laptops and desktop computers.

The two-hour sessions will give participants a deeper understanding and practical experience in Tempest attacks — the exploiting of electromagnetic emissions in order to gather information data.

For more information on HITBSecConf2009, go to http://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2009kl/.

The event is endorsed by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, Malaysian National Computer Confederation, and Multimedia Development Corporation.