Gear up for spooky season at IVU with two presentations this month:
Ada Lovelace 101 by AST
Ada Lovelace in terms your non-computer friends will understand 🙂
and
Heist Planning Open Forum with Rob
How would you look for an attack vector on something “Un-hackable”?

It’s another Friday the 13th, just in time for September’s Irvine Underground meeting!

This month, we originally planed to host two speakers: AST presenting Ada Lovelace 101, and XP on hacking credit card rewards. Unfortunately, AST was unable to make it to IVU this month, and Ellwood volunteered at the meeting to talk about setting up LLCs for fun and profit, making this a personal-finance themed IVU.

Also, someone printed an extra-large IVU nametag for the post-defcon IVU sticker swap.

This year, DEF CON 32 took place during IVU, so in addition to our standard meeting, we hosted a Defcon party with our friends at NULL:404.

Our in-person meeting was a great place to hang out and talk tech, as usual. As most folks were at Defcon, we only had about 20 attendees in Irvine, and did not have a featured presentation or speaker.

In addition, this marks three years in a row of IVU members placing in the DEF CON Scavenger Hunt!
This year, IVU took first and second place, with teams Bananarchy and rengerate 1. Pool’s Open

With 27 days until DEF CON, this month’s IVU meeting was focused on explaining the ins and outs of the new venue. Yaxis shared some helpful bits of advice for DC32, along with various members from the community. Timecapsule also gave away a few copies of his soldering project, a 2D6 dice roller.

Planning to attend DEFCON 32? Irvine Underground and Null:404 plan to host a party on Friday night!

Irvine Underground kicked off our mid-year meeting with a new milestone – eighty-six attendees!

This month, our original speaker couldn’t make it, so Guillotine stepped up with a half-hour talk on Quantum Computing. Stay tuned, because Guillotine will give a full, hour-long quantum computing talk soon.

We also featured a short DEF CON 32 primer, for everyone at IVU attending. IVU’s plans for DC32 to be announced soon!

Ninety days until DEF CON 32!

This month’s IVU marks a new milestone, where we livestreamed our entire IVU meeting via discord.

Originally, our planned speaker dropped last-minute, and two of our community members swooped in with a save at the last minute – lunchbucket presented a talk on Proxmox, while Ghriz shared his knowedge of tarantulas with the group.

See you in June!

For the month of April, Gulliver’s hosted us in their banquet room due to the weather.

This month featured a moblie appsec talk by matlac, Hacking Android Apps for Dummies

Also, huge congrats to the Cyber@UCI team for winning 2nd place at WRCCDC! We’re proud to have the students of Cyber@UCI as a part of our community.

And featuring a very special guest during the post-IVU Parkinglotcon:

Welcome back! This month’s IVU meeting featured a talk on PiHole (and DNS) with Mr. Bill.

Take control of your DNS away from your ISP (and others). An introduction to a popular open source project to provide protection for your whole network, and a chance to break it and blame DNS for real.

Happy (almost) Valentine’s Day!

This month, we hosted caraboo and Stengo from UC Irvine for their talk, School of Hard Hacks.

With a new generation of students entering the job market, it’s a pretty big wonder what they’re learning and how ready they’ll be to jump into the “real world”. As students themselves, join Stengo and caraboo as they give a fresh perspective on their journey through discovering cybersecurity, trends they’re observing, and just where the hell they’re learning all this stuff.

This month marks the one-year mark since the reboot of IVU, and we hit a new record of 65 people at the meeting!
Big thanks to our organizers, longtime members, first-time attendees, and you for helping to make this happen.

Happy new year! This month, IVU had over 50 people in attendance – our highest headcount since lockdown. Woohoo!

This month, we also had a throwback to the IVU days of old, with some pregaming at El Torito before the official meeting. As always, folks brought along their projects, some hardware, and even some padlocks to work on.

Our main speakers this month was Cannibal, who presented “A talk about on cleaning products”:
During defcon at an unreasonable time of the night, Yaxis and I were talking about giving a talk at IVU and asked what I wanted to present on. I thought it would be fun to let Yaxis pick and he jokingly threw out “cleaning products”. So show up Friday the 12th for my presentation on Cleaning Products!

Happy holidays!

This month’s IVU meeting featured a talk on the Zero Trust security model by Yaxis.

We’re getting ready for Thanksgiving this month with a chip decapping clinic by StringFellow, who brought some silicon, microscopes, and tools to demo this reverse engineering technique.

Other members brought some of their vintage computer components to show off as well, including a modem board and its original drivers stored on a 3d-printed save icon.

Happy Friday the 13th!

October’s IVU meeting featured a virtual talk by HackBeer’d (Beau Woods)

Peg Legs, Pentests, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Avast, ye LAN lubbers! Grab a grog and park yer ParrotOS while ol’ cap’n HackBeer’d tells a tail -f /dev/urandom of pirates, hackers, and the Constitution. This talk loosely traces piracy from its earliest recorded occurrence, the C Peoples overrunning RAMses to end the Big Iron age, from boarding parties to black boxes, with branches into interesting side nodes from history, like surprising links to the US founders. Along the way, learn how pirate code, legal code, and software code resemble each other, and what we can learn from each to strengthen the others.

Welcome back from hacker summer camp!

This month’s IVU meeting featured Varx as a (remote) guest speaker. His talk, Training and Running LLMs, included code, demos, and in-depth explanations on how anyone can build and run their own large language machine learning models from home.

Big thanks to all of the members who helped with the A/V setup this month. We’ll have the proper cables next time.

In addition to Varx’s presentation, ezemar shared some of his audiophile equipment, and one member showed off the latest additions to their wardriving rig.

With both Defcon and IVU back in-person, it only seems fitting to have an IVU meetup at Defcon.

This year, we met for a quiet dinner before going our separate ways to hack the planet.