The Song Must NOT Go On

Presented at ShmooCon 2023, Jan. 21, 2023, 2 p.m. (30 minutes)

It all started with a simple goal… to harness the ability to skip songs. Armed with a Flipper Zero, I vowed to protect the patrons of our local meetup spot from listening to the Pokemon theme song on loop and being Rick Rolled throughout their night. Fortunately, the local bar’s Touchtunes jukebox was no match for the Flipper, some open source projects, and a little determination. Unfortunately, this experiment led to the realization that with the power of skipping songs potentially came the ability to target people at the venue. This talk shows how a single button press and some malicious intent could take you from some innocent fun at the bar to being able to target those around you. As various hacking “toys” become more available, the popularity of “party hacks” continue to grow. Whether it be turning off your bar’s TVs, skipping songs on the jukebox, or opening your friend’s Tesla charge port, we need to take a step back and look how these seemingly innocent tricks could be leveraged by someone with malicious intentions.


Presenters:

  • Christopher Forte
    Christopher Forte (“isaidnocookies”) (@chris__forte) is a security researcher and infrastructure engineer. He holds degrees in computer science and psychology and has various industry certs. Christopher currently runs the DC702 group, the local Las Vegas TOOOL chapter, and is passionate about being involved in the community.