}
Next Irvine Underground Meeting
2024.04.12 at Gulliver's, 7pm

February 09, 2024

Happy (almost) Valentine’s Day!

This month, we hosted caraboo and Stengo from UC Irvine for their talk, School of Hard Hacks.

With a new generation of students entering the job market, it’s a pretty big wonder what they’re learning and how ready they’ll be to jump into the “real world”. As students themselves, join Stengo and caraboo as they give a fresh perspective on their journey through discovering cybersecurity, trends they’re observing, and just where the hell they’re learning all this stuff.

This month marks the one-year mark since the reboot of IVU, and we hit a new record of 65 people at the meeting!
Big thanks to our organizers, longtime members, first-time attendees, and you for helping to make this happen.

January 12, 2024

Happy new year! This month, IVU had over 50 people in attendance – our highest headcount since lockdown. Woohoo!

This month, we also had a throwback to the IVU days of old, with some pregaming at El Torito before the official meeting. As always, folks brought along their projects, some hardware, and even some padlocks to work on.

Our main speakers this month was Cannibal, who presented “A talk about on cleaning products”:
During defcon at an unreasonable time of the night, Yaxis and I were talking about giving a talk at IVU and asked what I wanted to present on. I thought it would be fun to let Yaxis pick and he jokingly threw out “cleaning products”. So show up Friday the 12th for my presentation on Cleaning Products!

December 08, 2023

Happy holidays!

This month’s IVU meeting featured a talk on the Zero Trust security model by Yaxis.

November 10, 2023

We’re getting ready for Thanksgiving this month with a chip decapping clinic by StringFellow, who brought some silicon, microscopes, and tools to demo this reverse engineering technique.

Other members brought some of their vintage computer components to show off as well, including a modem board and its original drivers stored on a 3d-printed save icon.

October 13, 2023

Happy Friday the 13th!

October’s IVU meeting featured a virtual talk by HackBeer’d (Beau Woods)

Peg Legs, Pentests, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Avast, ye LAN lubbers! Grab a grog and park yer ParrotOS while ol’ cap’n HackBeer’d tells a tail -f /dev/urandom of pirates, hackers, and the Constitution. This talk loosely traces piracy from its earliest recorded occurrence, the C Peoples overrunning RAMses to end the Big Iron age, from boarding parties to black boxes, with branches into interesting side nodes from history, like surprising links to the US founders. Along the way, learn how pirate code, legal code, and software code resemble each other, and what we can learn from each to strengthen the others.

September 08, 2023

Welcome back from hacker summer camp!

This month’s IVU meeting featured Varx as a (remote) guest speaker. His talk, Training and Running LLMs, included code, demos, and in-depth explanations on how anyone can build and run their own large language machine learning models from home.

Big thanks to all of the members who helped with the A/V setup this month. We’ll have the proper cables next time.

In addition to Varx’s presentation, ezemar shared some of his audiophile equipment, and one member showed off the latest additions to their wardriving rig.

IVU @ Defcon 31

With both Defcon and IVU back in-person, it only seems fitting to have an IVU meetup at Defcon.

This year, we met for a quiet dinner before going our separate ways to hack the planet.

July 14, 2023

Our speaker this month was fuzzingpanda, who gave a talk on Security CTFs.

As we are one month from Defcon 31, Yaxis also gave a lightning Defcon 101 talk.

Pappasmurf shared his love of mechanical keyboards at the meeting as well.

June 09, 2023

IVU’s heating up this June with cryoticbytes’ talk, A Schpeal About The Man.

In addition, several other members brought their own tech and devices to share.

May 12, 2023

This month, Yaxis hosted an open lockpicking night, with an assortment of locks and tools available for everyone to use. Duald and stringfellow also brought some servers and tech they were working on.

April 14, 2023

Welcome back to Irvine Underground!

This month, Sloth shared a wardriving setup he’s been working on.

Our speaker this month was duald, who gave a presentation on the Shell on Demand Appliance (SODA Machine) he built for Defcon. The SODA Machine is an entire data center in a soda machine, and all of its parts are 100% dumpster dived, from its servers to the vending machine itself. I’ve attached a picture of the machine at Defcon 30 last year below, courtesy of NUCC.

In addition, here’s a video from DC30 with more information.

March 10, 2023

This month’s IVU meeting was a quiet one. Rain meant everyone had to sit indoors instead of on the patio.

This month’s speaker was Monica, who presented a deep-sea project she’s working on.

Looking forward to seeing you at next month’s IVU!
Hoping for some clear weather next month.

February 10, 2023

Another great IVU meeting.

Blackdrako shared his recent projects with the group, including this handmade IVU t-shirt with 3d-printed lighting.

Another member also brought a set of progressive locks to learn lockpicking with.

May 10, 2019

It was a wonderful meeting we had, topics were thrown left and right. Creativity was on the air, it was full of interesting ideas,as website security, hardware projects,locks secutity, education, teaching and more.

We also had a presentation by nullptr, telling us about processors structure and exploits. Check it out in our you tube channel at: irvine underground or direct link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4UswlG_LZs Check the video description for the slide show.

There were skepticism about locks about how secure they can be, there is always a topic for controversy , but one thing is true the more secure they are the longer it takes to be open and security increase. The more secure a lock is, the better the challenge.

We had a camera brought by astcell. The camera was a great piece of hardware with its own stabilizer, double camera, compact and compatible with iphone. Also Daman brought his pcb board design by him we are eager to see the final result when it gets assemble.

New update for the new 3d hobbyist , printing with wood filament. It needs some especial configuration as higher temperature and lower speed. It was suggested flex filament, but as the other one, special configurations are needed.

Reminder for defcon and organization was talked about. Get ready for the adventure and organize rides and reservations.

IVU a place for freedom of thinking, don’t miss the next meeting.


IVU April 8 2020

It’s been a while since there is something new in our site, but here is a quick update about our activities.

firstly the last few months we were having our usual meeting at ihop, so everything is been good we had a few interesting presentations from some of our members about different topics as: Pwnagotchi hardware that can be use as a tool for security if use the right way,(desclaimer use it responsibly and at your own risk) .

We also had a presentation about a cybersec-manga created by one of our creative members, this is a story full of mystery and always letting you intrigue about what is going to happen next. So if you are more interesting you can join the group and find out what is all this story about.

So these are a few of the presentations or information we presented in our group. We are always interested and having more topics to be presented on the meet up, so we scout for new presenters to bring new light to our group knowledge base to share and inform in a responsibly manner.

These last months were busy and fun till our fun was clouded by covid-19. Now we are doing things differently, the last meet ups we had, were been stream on line with these software tools as: zoom or chat on slack for security of our members in newcomers. If you want to join us and find out more about stay tune to our site to let you know how you can have the IVU experience without getting out from home. (for now)

In the meantime stay healthy, stay busy, stay home.

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