Adam Laurie at Blackhat USA 2009

Adam Laurie floored me with his “Satellite Hacking” talk at Blackhat USA 2009. I respect Adam’s work, humor and presentation skills. His approach thrilled me and reminded me of what hacking is all about: creativity and curiosity culminating in technologically cool stuff. Using $900 worth of gear, Adam hacked together a system that graphed (in 3D) feed signals found in a frequency range and horizon position. Instead of scanning through text data, he simply picked out the small (interesting) blips amongst the broad (commercial) smears. In his LIVE demo, he grabbed a UDP stream from a mysterious satellite over Africa with his UK-based dish and routed it to his machine in DC. Also, in an unrelated ($50) demo, he injected data into a US RFID-chipped passport’s signal stream, making the bearer none other than Osama bin Laden. Wicked, Adam!