Meanwhile, the annual Chaos Communication Congress is more than a month ago, which means that all lectures held there can be found online. For us this is more than enough reason to look back on the 36C3 of the Chaos Computer Club in Leipzig and to review our 36C3 lecture recommendations.
It’s year 3 after the Chaos Communication Congress moved from Hamburg to Leipzig. Three years in which the Congress was able to settle in and grow in Leipzig. So the Chaos Computer Club was able to set a new record of 17.000 visitors at the 36C3. For so many visitors the lecture program was extended. So 236 lectures and workshops were held on the five official stages alone.
This time there was a wider range of topics than ever before. From science, space travel, language analysis, politics to IT security, everything was there. To help you find your way through this huge jumble of lectures, we offer a selection of our highlights below.
36C3 Lecture recommendations – Brain hacking by Linus Neumann
This presentation by the security researcher and press spokesman of CCC Linus Neumann is about our daily business. The fight against fraud on the Internet through phishing mails. This lecture shows which psychological mechanisms lead to people falling for such e-mails and what can be done about it. Nevertheless, we can recommend this talk to anyone, as it explains the topic of phishing with a lot of humour and yet still to the point.
36C3 Presentation recommendations – How to Break PDFs by Vladislav Mladenov
Signing PDFs plays an important role in today’s working life when it comes to exchanging contracts and sensitive data between two parties via PDFs. In this talk, security researchers from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum explain which attacks have been discovered during their research on the validation of signatures. This talk is especially recommended for readers who are looking for a secure program to read PDFs.
36C3 Lecture recommendations – The useful-unobjectionable spectrum of Felix von Leitner
In it, the well-known blogger and code auditor Fefe discusses his observations of recent years. More specifically, Fefe argues that software often starts out small and secure and at some point begins to become insecure. When this happens, their security concerns are usually addressed by sandboxing them without addressing the insecurities.
The media star – “Hacker or not”: The electronic patient file is coming! by Martin Tschirsich
This is one of the talks from 36c3 which has received a lot of attention in the media. This talk deals with the much discussed “digital patient file” and its security gaps. Martin Tschirsich shows how he managed to access patient files without any technical weaknesses. This talk shows very nicely how serious security holes can be on the level of processes.
36C3 Presentation recommendations – Cryptography demystified by oots
Straight at the Chaos Computer Congress, all speakers talk about encryption. This talk shows the basics of encryption and cryptographic methods without the need of previous knowledge. In this talk oot shows how to encrypt and protect data from manipulation without any mathematics. There are many more lectures waiting for you.
In addition to the talks we present here, there are a lot of other talks which we could recommend. But this would go beyond the scope of this article. If you want to see more talks you can download all videos on the page of the CCC and stream them.
