Free access to the Black Hat Video Stream? Yep, that was the case. Read on for the whole story.
I was unable to attend Black Hat in person this year. Instead, I decided I would closely monitor twitter, blogs and the Black Hat page itself to stay up to date. In this process I noticed the new "Black Hat Uplink" service that would allow remote individuals access to streaming Black Hat talks from two select tracks. Great! Now I could watch some talks even though I wasn't there. This sounded perfect and I began the registration process.
However, during registration I was quickly sidetracked by a few oddities in the design. Long story short, I identified a series of flaws that would enable the creation of an account with only providing an email address (e.g. no name, address, phone etc) and I was never asked to enter any credit card data. Odd I thought, perhaps you enter the credit card info upon your first login. The only problem was that I didn't actually have a registration email with a link to the login page. A few select Google searches and I ended up on a relatively vanilla looking login page. I have a username and a key, let's give it a shot. To my surprise the login was accepted and I was now sitting in front of the live Black Hat video stream.
[...]