환영 IVU!

Summer is in full swing and with Black Hat/DEF CON around the corner it looks to be a busy next couple of weeks for the hacking community.

Pre-IVU meeting at Gulliver’s and El Torito was as welcoming as ever and enjoyed by all that joined.

Ben made his IVU presentation debut with a talk on the currently available Host-based Intrusion Detection Systems (HIDS) and some of the pros and cons that they offer. Some of the HIDS brought up were Snort, OSSEC, and AIDE. Ben’s slides can be viewed here.

Also speaking was Kyle about the cryptography on the IVU Challenge Coin. The crypto was devised by Israel Torres for the coin and has been wracking peoples brains on trying to figure it out for the past couple of months with only the vaguest hints. Well, the crypto was found out and Kyle provided a talk on the general topic of cryptography, from a brief history, to basic math on crypto, and finally basic techniques used to break the IVU crypto and discover its hidden meaning. Kyle also showed his Python tool for encrypting and decrypting the code which can be found on GitHub. Kyle’s slides can be found here.

While DEF CON will be meeting on August 9-12 that doesn’t mean there won’t be an IVU for the people that are not attending DEF CON. So we hope the people going have a safe trip and we’ll see the rest of you meeting up for IVU on August 10th!

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Желанный IVU!

The days are getting longer and the nights warmer so summer is just around the corner in our desert.

The pre-meeting gathered at Gulliver’s and were joined by the infamous israeltorres in his triumphant return back. Drinks, cigars, and the giant sampler platter was enjoyed.

Howard made another presentation with the topic of social engineering normal people in thinking hackers are just as normal, a.k.a. social/business networking tips. Howard brought up how, yes, it can be difficult for most of us, but it’s not impossible to learn and understand small talk, general interaction, and even had cheat codes available. All of this was done with massive amount of heckling.

After initial talk a handful of older members brought in some extra insights on networking and also gave Howard some good presentation tips as well to smooth out some of the bumps.

The rest of the night was filled with more intermingling among friends and lasted till the wee hours of the night.

We all hope you have a great month and can’t wait to see everyone at the next meeting on July 13th!

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Hopefully everyone has had a good time with the strange weather over the past month as it’s ranged from uncomfortably warm or cold and almost raining in the desert oasis.

The pre-meeting gathered a smaller group at Gulliver’s with the skies temping rain and then moved to El Torito in the last hour before heading for the this months meeting.

A small overview of DEFCON 26 was presented by a couple people as a way to encourage people to come and visit the Hacker Stickers booth.

LayerOne is also around the corner in case you can’t make it to Vegas and Pasadena is an easier option for someone not needing a full DEFCON experience but still wants to visit a Hacker Stickers booth. 😉

Jonathan Wash presented a talk on a little known topic of alcohol. More specifically cocktail he thinks are easy and delicious to order at the watering hole of your choice or even at home for personal drinks or parties. Some of the drinks included a French 75, a Negoni, a Black Russian, and even a hair of the dog bonus “cocktail”. The slides for the talk with recipes can be found here.

Hopefully we’ll see some of you at LayerOne later this month but if not come one and all for the next IVU on June 8th!

Fáilte IVU!

Hopefully everyone has had a good time with the strange weather over the past month as it’s ranged from uncomfortably warm or cold and almost raining in the desert oasis.

The pre-meeting gathered a smaller group at Gulliver’s with the skies temping rain and then moved to El Torito in the last hour before heading for the this months meeting.

A small overview of DEFCON 26 was presented by a couple people as a way to encourage people to come and visit the Hacker Stickers booth.

LayerOne is also around the corner in case you can’t make it to Vegas and Pasadena is an easier option for someone not needing a full DEFCON experience but still wants to visit a Hacker Stickers booth. 😉

Jonathan Wash presented a talk on a little known topic of alcohol. More specifically cocktail he thinks are easy and delicious to order at the watering hole of your choice or even at home for personal drinks or parties. Some of the drinks included a French 75, a Negoni, a Black Russian, and even a hair of the dog bonus “cocktail”. The slides for the talk with recipes can be found here.

Hopefully we’ll see some of you at LayerOne later this month but if not come one and all for the next IVU on June 8th!

BIpIv’a’ IVU!

With daylight savings time in full swing the days are starting to get longer and so the weather is starting to turn warm again in our fine desert oasis.

Pre-meeting was enjoyed by all with Dutch courage and food at Gulliver’s and El Torito.

Howard “yxais” went for a hat trick presentation on his continued process of getting started and running a Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) team from the ground up.

He brought up the challenges he and his team has gone through competing, processes to help learn from mistakes (documentation FTW!), gathering support and sponsors, and setting up a beginner CTF for people inside the group (and out) to learn about some of techniques in the competition.

The rest of the meeting was social talking that included a possible future IVU bottle share for with the beer loving members. If you’re interested in joining up please let us know in the Slack channel.

Please set your calendars for the next meeting in May on the 11th!

Yōkoso IVU!

The weather was still cool for the meeting but nothing a outdoor space heater or an IHOP can’t fix.

The usual imbibing of drinks, food, and good company at Gulliver’s and El Torito was had and enjoyed by the participants.

The March meeting was a little laid back as trash1e presented a basic overview of Amazon Web Services and showing what is offered from Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for straight server instances, to Lambda serverless computing for running code in an event-driven way, to Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage needs.

The rest of the night was filled with more discussions and idea sharing as always.

Also in March from the 8th to the 11th was the 16th annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 16x), which a few IVU’s attended to learn, talk in hallway con, and help spread some OSS love. On Saturday night there was Game Night with plenty of food, drinks, and of course games including an Escape Room where DC 562 members and IVU members joined together and kicked the room’s butt with a blistering time of 3 minutes and 43 seconds that was not beaten by anyone else.

We hope that everyone has a good rest of their March and are looking forward to the next meeting on April 13th.

Salutations IVU.

This months meet up was a good social gathering. There more new faces in the crowd and more first timers. The UCI numbers continue to increase. There was a small pre meet up at El Torito prior. There were no speakers for this months gathering, but there were plenty of discussions around the table. AST Cell talked a bit about DEFCON Beijing and his future attendance. Yaxis described is fear of going back to China.

As the conversation started to turn AST Cell began to scare the young ones opening the forum to discussions of goatse and Pool 2 girl. We shared photos and a little bit of history. We talked about the possibility of a Pool 2 Girl badge for DEFCON briefly. More historical photos can be found at Hackerphotos.com. Pictures have been collected and curated since Defcon 8.

Blackdrako shared some of his projects including the IVU Badge Pi and opened discussions about a hacker space for the group.

The next meet up is March 9th. Hope to see you there!

Happy new year IVU!

The holidays are over and the new year is here so welcome 2018!

It was a chilly night with the pre-meeting of cigars and drinks around the fire at Gulliver’s and then more drinks and food at El Torito where it was quite packed so we got the VIP balcony seats, oh yeah. 😉

A short talk was given by our own Jorge Dominguez, a.k.a. Blackdrako, on his current project of integrating a Raspberry Pi and Google AIY Voice based system inside of a bound book case. Many laughs were had at Google expense trying to force it to speak different languages and making “Ricky” its wife.

Ending the talk a Google AIY Voice kit was raffled off and after a tedious amount of waiting, or at least that is what the losers felt, Kelvin Brandon had the winning number and took the prize he was already holding.
The rest of the night was filled with discussions and trying to not crash the drone Jorge also brought too much.

The year has just started here and if you weren’t able to make it this month please just us next month on February 9th!

Bienvenido IVU!

With Thanksgiving behind us and a handful of major holidays coming up it’s time for relaxation and cheer to be spread around and have our last meeting of the year.

Pre-meeting meetup was filled with talks of the impending doom of net neutrality repeal and our dismay of no mini hamburgers at 6:30 as promised!

But drinks were imbibed, other food ordered, and our chats civilized as always.

One of our newest attendees, Calvin Slater, took the spotlight this month to show off how he and his company setup and help companies control their HAVC, alarm, and other IoT/microcontroller enabled systems. He included some micro-controllers to display and showed how a basic system would be setup and have hundreds to thousands of sensors within ducting and rooms to control and monitor the environment(s). Calvin also brought up the possible future of these systems to include Raspberry Pi like SOCs, Arduino controllers, and software like Node-RED to program these new systems in the future.

Everyone please have a great rest of your holidays and a happy new year and we hope to see you on January 12th!

Gi nathlam hí IVU!

The holiday are upon us and with it comes early darkness, cool nights, and relaxed attitudes enjoying the festivities.

Pre-meeting was at Gulliver’s with lots of new faces for cigars, drinks, food, and even a car chase.

Howard once again was the focus of the meeting but not he was not solo this time as he brought some of his Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) team to introduce themselves and the whole meeting was filled with answering questions and giving insights to the team as they were competing in their first competition soon.

Also IVU doesn’t just only meet on the second Friday of the month. We also plan nice outings which include going to a firing range to shoot some pistols like we did on the 3rd at Firing-Line Indoor Shooting in Huntington Beach (http://www.firingline.net).

The pistols ranged from .22 revolvers up to .45 semi-autos with everyone enjoying a little time with all of them.

We even had a friendly little competition at the end with each person having only 6 rounds and a small target pushed all the way down the range (~100 feet) and of course beginners luck kicked in and Howard won the match with 33 points!

Till next time, December 8th, and we hope to see everyone there!

Salutations IVU!

It was an unusually warm and moist Friday the 13^th meetup this month. We had a more intimate showing for the pre-meet for cigars and cocktails (and wine) at Gulliver’s. The pre-meet decided to do a throwback for the last hour of pre-meet and head over to El Torito for a few margaritas. Social lubrication intensified further before kicking things off for the official October 2017 IVU meetup.

This month’s meetup saw many new faces! Our group continues to grow bit by bit with new folks as well as some that haven’t been around in a while. We had two very engaging talks by IVUers. First, yaxis lead a talk on the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) and how the first ever team is shaping up at UCI. The process revolved around gathering interest, vetting said interested parties, and building up the skills needed to compete. The video can be found at our new YouTube channel here. You can find out more about CCDC here.

DaMan treated us with the second talk of the night. The talk featured DaMans prototype F.R.E.D. Actuating Arm (Firgelli FA-400-L-12-15) using an Arduino (MEGA 2560 rev3), lasers (Adafruit VL53L0X ), and other off-the-shelf parts he’s put together a robotics system to power the opening and closing of secret doors or anything else you want to push and pull. DaMan also explained his plans to add on private Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity to control the unit remotely.

Update: DaMan has provided a video of the secret door in action!

We also saw the power of the Voltron Sloth increase this month as Red Sloth joined the meet. Sloth and Blue Sloth were pleased.

The next meet-up is November Friday November 10^th. Come and join us!

Hello IVU!

Our September meetup was swell. We had a great turn out for the pre-meet at Gulliver’s for cigars and cocktails. Plenty of good conversation and good times were had by most.

Our very own Jonathan Wash discussed Password Managers and how to learn to love randomization in passwords. The conversation covered managers such as LastPass, 1Password, Passpack, KeyPass, and Keychain. See the slides for more information: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/NXQi76ytFD61dt

As you may have heard there was a voting machine hacking village at DEFCON this year. We’ve obtained a few voting machinesand we will be presenting on them over the next few meetups. Keep an eye on our schedule to find out more information about it.

We also had another game maker, Joseph Roche, drop by and talk about his game Savage Fighter.

Our October meet up is Friday the 13th. Pre-meet as per usual. See you there!

Hello IVU!

Another great showing for our pre-meet up as well as the actual meet up! The group seems to be getting larger and larger every time. This month’s meetup covered a few topics: Epic Role, Tamper Evident, and Badge Life.

Our special guest Pappy stopped by to show off his board game Epic Role. Epic Roll is a quick-playing, dice-based, fantasy board game that is portable and simple to learn while also providing players with numerous strategic decisions and gambles.

Pappy described his thoughts behind the game and how the primary goal behind Epic Role was to merge ideas and thoughts of other games to make something that was quicker and easier to play.

The conversation quickly turned to logistics behind game making. The discussion of marketing, manufacturing became quite interesting as we learned of some of the difficulties behind making and shipping the product as well as how shelf space works for the retailer. Some deals could garner you space with the front of the box showing, where other deals may only allow the spine to be visible from the store shelf.

Because of this fantastic artwork was crucial. Having box artwork that looked enticing from the spines as well as the cover was greatly needed. Also with this great artwork was needed for the cards! Pappy also mentioned that finding good artists is valuable. Artists can be like magicians and disappear if you’re not careful!

After Pappy finished his talk we had smaller discussions at the other end of the table around the Tamper Evident village and Badge Life at DC5. Sloth, Yaxis, and Tuesday brought in some of the leftovers from Tamper Evident and spoke briefly with those curious about the Tamper Evident Village. They also brought in some of the new and shiny badges from DC25 to talk about the latest trend of Badge Life. This included the Bender badge and talks about the interconnectivity of the badges at the conference.

At our September meet up, we will be hearing from our very own JonathanWash. JonathaWash will provide an overview of password managers, what’s out there, and some best practices of use. It looks like it will be a fun discussion.

Next IVU meet up is September 8th 2017. Hope to see you there!

Hello IVU!

Another great turn out this month even with DEFCON 25 just around the corner.

Our very own trash1e presenting his whiteboard talk on the importance of keeping and sharing threat intelligence:

• With automating threat intelligence, it can make security all the more manageable, workable, and centralized.
• Why keeping threat intelligence is important for an organization to maintain their systems security integrity well tuned
• By sharing intelligence cross trusted organizations can help improve everyone’s network security
• And the importance of keeping a web of trust between organizations

Other group discussions included on the pros and cons of setting up a non-profit for possible future growth of our beloved org and some pre DEFCON 25 planning

We hope the people going to DEFCON this year have a safe and fun trip and that everyone can join us again next month, August 11th, at 8PM upstairs at IHOP.

Hello IVU!

What a great meet-up!

This was a huge turnout and everyone was getting involved with our soldering activity from beginners to experts. No burns (that I heard of at least…) so all is good! After arriving we had soldering stations set up and had groups of three or so getting together to work on the Jack badge. According to one local witness it even looked like a hacker space!

Thanks to all the experienced folks for sticking it out and helping the noobs with fix errors and helping with the eyes. Thanks to all that stuck around until the very end to make sure everyone got their badge completed and helped with the clean up!

Lots of learning and lots of teaching. Docendo Discimus!

See you next meet-up to continue the conversations, discuss security automation, and talk about DEFCON coming up in a few weeks.

DEFCON 25 is soon! July 27 – 30. It’s at Caesar’s Palace this year.