Giant Ginkgo

After Jello's presentation Saturday night, I ended up going out to the Irish bar across the street, which was filled to the brim with conference attendees and speakers. I met a whole bunch of new people, the two most interesting out of the group were Jennifer a designer who is moving to NYC, and Robert Steele, an old spook who lectured at the con.

After the bar closed a large group of us went back to the hotel and eventually found a room to continue our late night party in. After a few more drinks (and the security guy who was hanging around with us left) a plan was devised to liberate the large H2K2 metal logo from the mezzanine area. A classic plan of distraction was devised so that security would be too busy to notice the letters walking off. Needless to say, the plan worked perfectly.

The letters and a banner that was borrowed. The t-shirts hanging on the letters were from security.

The security guy called us about 20 minutes later, and told us that the H2K2 sign had been stolen. Supposedly the police had caught the perpetrators and were planning on holding them until Tuesday! We decided that it would be a good idea to return the letters before he came back to the room. The sign was placed at the entrance to conference room 'A' and rearranged to spell KISS.

We started talking about the security badges that had been provided for the conference, and how easy it was to fake them. It was decided that we needed new and improved 'KISS' badges, so I ended up taking a snapshot of one and used Photoshop to make the changes. Around 8am Jenn, Mike Glasser and I went to Kinkos and printed the badges and a photo of the stolen letters.

The last session that I saw was easily one of the best, known nationally because of an AT&T memo that gained attention from the media. It was the infamous Social Engineering event. Unfortunately it got off to a bad start because Verizon had 'accidentally' stopped the line from being able to call out to anything but toll-free numbers. While they were trying to gain dialing capabilities some wicked stories were told about some classic pranks. A workaround was made with some calling cards, and the show got rolling. The AT&T memo was the first thing to be discussed, so they called up an operator to see if they could get help from them reconnecting the line. She was very guarded and wouldn't provide any usefull information.

The next phone call was to a local Manhattan Starbucks, and it went perfectly. Emmanuel Goldstein pretended to be a network repairman from Starbucks Headquarters. The poor worker on the phone told him that they were having problems with the credit card uploads... So he slowly worked the guy over until he had him reading credit card numbers over the phone. (He stopped him before he had actually read the first one fully off.) The last call was to the Russian Tea Room, a well known New York restaurant. Playing a befuddled husband, he managed to change the reservations of a completely random dinner party, plus he got their actual name and phone number. So he called them up afterwards and left a message telling them that their reservations had been pushed back a half hour. (After the session ended they changed the reservations back.)