Whitedust

Whitedust was (closed 14 August 2007) an independent computer security news portal that is run by Mark Hinge and Mark Anderson (One of the founders of the Hivercon Security Conference and Creator of the spam blocking software Whitemail). It started on March 18, 2005 with the goal of giving an independent view on security from an impartial point of view. Its impartiality has been strongly disputed by commenters of sites such as slashdot and digg although its founders maintain they publish material in the spirit of "free publishing" and with no underlying agenda.

Whitedust specialises in computer security news and publishes articles on related topics and interviews with various figures from the 'underground' and infosec 'scene'. It contains background information about the topic of Hacking.

Its conspiracy theories, technical articles, papers and interviews have been quoted by a number of popular new sources such as Slashdot, digg, msnbc, eweek, zdnet, [http://www.whitedust.net/files/mark%20whitedust%20edit%20interview.mp3 BBC Radio5 LIVE] (Audio) and The Guardian.

Content and motivation

Whitedust does not seem to shy away from hacktivism in any of its forms; indeed one of its better known and more widely linked and distributed publications was claiming that Wal-Mart had been editing its page to present a more favourable view. This incident led to the page for Wal-Mart being restricted for quite some time. Whitedust has been involved in various other such campaigns cantering around "righting" what certain hacktivists would claim are internet "wrongs" - although the motivation of Whitedust's staff is not always crystal clear to say the least.

Interesting technical articles published by the site included of what is now known as "Darkmail" attacks some time before the phrase itself was used to describe such attack vectors.

Figures that have been interviewed include Simple Nomad (A senior security analyst at Vernier Networks), Fyodor (author of the Nmap Security Scanner), Elonka Dunin, , Jason Scott Sadofsky and Richard Thieme.

Aside from all the controversy of its home grown articles Whitedust is a well maintained aggregator of third party news, serving as a daily, sometimes hourly, round up of the day’s computer security and hacking news.

The Black And White Ball

As of January 2007 Whitedust has launched a call for papers for a 4 day computer security and hacking conference named "" - To be held in London's premier Ministry of Sound nightclub.

As of the 4th of June 2007 the vast majority of the lineup for the Black And White Ball has been confirmed, both Black and White track, including Richard Thieme and Oxblood Ruffin as keynote speakers.

Whitedust Director Mark Anderson tackled this issue on the Ball website stating that "financial red tape" in the United Kingdom "due to the international nature of the Whitedust staff" had caused a number of delays.

Tickets for the Ball finally went on sale but the ball was ultimately cancelled on the 17th of July citing financial redtape;

"It is with a sad heart that I must inform you that The Black & White Ball, to be held in London this coming September, has been cancelled. After many long days of agonising debate amongst the conference staff, it has been decided that the financial red tape and bureaucracy that we faced has delayed planning far too long.

We had hoped to surmount the initial problems but five months into our schedule, we are still facing fresh challenges almost daily. We could never have anticipated the difficulty in setting up simple Anglo-Irish banking facilities. Ultimately these on-going delays compressed our planned timescale to breaking point.

Every single ticket holder will be reimbursed in full. I wish to apologise for the inconvenience and for the disappointment. I assure you, we are just as disappointed as you are."

Expansion

As of August 2006 most of the primary Whitedust staff have launched a video games news portal much in the style of Whitedust.net. Although not officially part of Whitedust, the site is run, maintained and promoted in exactly the same manner - as well as advertised on the Whitedust.net site by the same team. The site is called [http://www.soljo.org/games/ Games @ soljo.org].

In April 2007, Whitedust and The Syndicate Of London launched , a social networking site aimed at allowing members of the underground hacking community to interact and collaborate. Amongst other things, members can set up blogs and groups, and leave anonymous confessions. Hakspace.net has been described as "MySpace for hackers" and is fully integrated with the main Whitedust site as of July the 18th 2007.

Controversy

Whitedust are not above making wild and unsubstantiated claims to promote their website and wares much like the Cult of the Dead Cow whom with they share members. Examples:

* Whitedust.net is the leading source of unbiased, uncut security news and articles.
Whitedust is a medium traffic site with a Google rating of 6 - it has been Slashdotted 32 times although hardly a leading source of self published news, Whitedust is rated highly as a portal site; the emphasis should perhaps have been placed on this "portal" element in their PR.

* Whitedust will be running the first annual Black & White Ball in London. Presented in a unique two track format,
This two track format is unique as far as Black Hat and White Hat tracks at a security conference go, however two tracks have been done for many years with other conferences in other industries.

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