HOPE Day 2 - Tales of Hotel Pennsylvania

Before we checked in, we expected:

• 2 beds
• free Internet access

What we got was:

• 1 bed
• no Internet access

The bedding issue wasn't too serious - after all, Mike had brought an air mattress, so we could get by. The problem was Internet access. But when 4 people with 4 laptops and plenty of networking gear are alone and bored in a hotel room, things happen. The Internet connection we could have got would have cost us $30 for the weekend, and you don't take that sitting down. So, Christian did some things and we soon found out that the gateway was running Windows with no firewall and IIS5. He called someone who knows things, and we had an exploit ready to go in a few minutes. However, we decided it wasn't the nicest thing to do, so we decided to leech wifi instead. Christian and Mike could get on, but I couldn't - my wifi card is considerably lower powered. Not to worry - Mike bridged his connection though a patch cable Bryon had. Sadly, by the time we had this all figured out, it was too late to do much and we had to get to sleep.

Fast forward to this morning. Still no net access for me, as the wifi set up by the convention only covers the 18th floor. In a lull of panels I didn't want to attend, I brought my laptop up to the Internet lounge on the top floor. I fired up kismet, and that worked perfectly - plenty of nodes to connect to (screenshot). However, it wasn't quite so simple when I tried to connect. After some hacking around, I found it.70.47.112.239, you bastard. I totally wasn't expecting something like this at a hacker convention. No way - you shocked me. As you can probably guess, my IP is 70.47.112.53 right now. Bring it, 70.47.112.239.