Black Hats

Subject tests are over. Now I really need to kick it into gear. Again, I still have to come up with an entirely new idea for my original work. This is turning out to be much harder than I anticipated. Many of my ideas are based on a limited knowledge of tools that are currently available to penetration testers or security professionals. Often times I will brainstorm a bunch of new ideas for tools, only to later on Google my idea and find that it has already been done in 10 different ways by others more experienced than me. As such, I've determined that my focus should not be on developing software tools, but rather on vulnerability exploitation or even hardware tools. The former will be significantly harder than the latter, I believe. I've found many speeches featured in the Black Hat conferences that discuss new and emerging vulnerabilities in areas ranging from cryptography to "human factors". Creating a hardware tool (for example, a device that can gain illegitimate access to a network through physical means), may be slightly easier, but will still require some sort of electrical engineering. That's also something I've never attempted before. By next week, I should have begun working on my original work.