You thought they were dead didn't you? You thought "I haven't seen a mainframe since the 90s, no one uses those anymore." Well you're wrong. Dead wrong. If you flew or drove to DEF CON your information was hitting a mainframe. Did you use credit or cash at the hotel? Doesn't matter, still a mainframe. Did you pay taxes, or perhaps call 911? What about going to the doctor? All using mainframes. At multiple points throughout the day, even if you don't do anything, your data is going through some mainframe, somewhere. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. So why is no one talking about them?
SoF & Bigendian Smalls, aka 'the insane chown posse', will dazzle and amaze with feats of hackery never before seen on the mainframe. From fully breaking network job entry (NJE) and their concept of trusted nodes, to showing you what happens when you design security in the 80s and never update your frameworks. We'll demonstrate that, yes Charlie Brown, you can in fact overflow a buffer on the mainframe. New tools will be released! Things like SET'n'3270 (SET, but for mainframes!) and VTAM walker (profiling VTAM applications). Updates to current tools will be released (nmap script galore!) everything from accurate version profiling to application ID brute forcing and beyond. You'll also learn how to navigate IBM so you can get access to your very own mainframe and help continue the research that we've started!
All of your paychecks rely on mainframes in one form or another, so maybe we should be talking about it.