At the recent ShmooCon hacking conference, one security researcher found out the hard way that such venues can be hostile, when an unknown hacker took control of the researcher's computer, disabling the firewall and starting up a file server.

"The machine was as hardened as best practices could suggest for anyone," the researcher said. The person who breached the PowerBook used information gathered from the computer to contact a friend of the researcher and bragged about the compromise. "This was not a subtle hack," the researcher stressed.

Read the full story at www.securityfocus.com