This presentation was stuck in between the SSH and Google Hacking presentations at Defcon on Saturday. I was not that interested in the presentation, but since I didn't feel like changing rooms at that time, I figured it was a good idea to sit through it. The audience for the presentation was fairly sparse, at least in comparison to the other talks that were being presented at Defcon.

The topic of the presentation was denial of information attacks. Denial of Information attacks are attacks on people instead of an attack on a computer itself. Probably the easiest form of a denial of information attack is spam, where users get inundated with so many e-mails that they have a hard time picking out the ones that they want to read. Other examples include the ads that are present on web pages or just software programs that spit out globs of information that is almost impossible to sift through. The presenter spent most of the time talking about the inundation of information and everything that you could do to change the way things work so that people are not saturated with information.

As I mentioned previously, I did not expect much from this presentation going in. However, in the end, it was a pretty good presentation. The presenter displayed a tool that provided different views to packet stream data. For a set of packet data, one could look at the contents of the packet data in many different forms (and sorted by many different types of input) and showed that even if there was a form of information attack by looking at this data through one form, one could change the way that they are looking at the data and get the information that they are searching for. This is really cool because this inundation of information is a problem in the security industry. Look at most IDS products and/or Ethereal, where it can be impossible to find what you want if you don't narrow down what you are searching for. It is awesome that someone is trying to look at the display of information this way.