How to pick an IT lock at Defcon 13

THERE WERE SEVERAL CONTESTS at Defcon, about 10 official ones, and a lot of unofficial ones, most of those involving copious amounts of alcohol. Some of the official ones were the Wi-Fi wardriving and fox and hound competitions that Renderman brought his rig for, a scavenger hunt and lockpicking contest.

The scavenger hunt has a truly unique list of things to find, ranging from Star Wars on laserdisk to getting two hot chicks to make out in front of the scavenger hunt booth. While they admitted the second one was purely gratuitous, I suspect the first one was too. They have a web site up for it here, but no list in electronic form yet. They look like this:

There was also a lockpicking contest, if you want physical access, you need to get through the door first. Umm.... I mean, if you lock your keys in your house, it is a handy skill to have. The best of the bunch were picking locks in under ten seconds to get to the final rounds, where a bunch of extremely difficult locks slowed things down.

There was a lot of interest in lockpicking at Defcon 13, it seems to be the new in thing for the modern hacker. In addition to the contest, there were a lot of workshops to teach you the skills you need to, umm, free your keys from an evil car, and almost anyone could walk away with enough knowledge to start picking. Advanced classes went all the way up to safecracking, a very useful skill in the modern world. µ