Podcast: Black Hat Preview With Trustwave’s Nick Percoco

Next week, the world’s attention will shift to Las Vegas for the annual Black Hat and DEFCON hacking conferences. What will be the big trends this year? We sat down last week with Nicholas Percoco of Trustwave’s Spider Labs to get his thoughts on the show.

Nick is a regular at Black Hat and other events – both in the audience and on the stage. He said one of the big themes this year will be hacks on consumer electronics and home automation systems. As we reported, two Trustwave researchers have delved into the security of a wide range of “smart home” technologies, including home automation gateways and even a bluetooth enabled “smart toilet.”

Percoco said that manufacturers of these devices need to pay more attention to security, and can’t assume that the people buying their devices are technically sophisticated enough to understand how to safely deploy or manage Internet connected systems. Smart home technology makers “presume that you have a secure home network. We know from testing corporate clients, many corporations don’t have secure wireless networks, let alone consumers,” Percoco said. 

To hear more of our interview with Nick, you can check out our podcast on Soundcloud (below), listen on iTunes, or download your own copy (below).