Why2025 was from Thursday, Aug 7 through Aug 12, but I had a truncated visit, arriving a day late and leaving Sunday evening.

On Sunday I mostly socialized with folks I had met over the weekend - I tracked down Frubar and had a drink from their robot bartender, and attended a few more talks.

Synology Disk Station Manager (DSM) - the good, the bad and the ugly

The first session I attended on Sunday was Mischa Rick van Geelen’s talk about Synology DSM. I have two Synology NAS servers, so I felt personally invested. Mischa is the founder of Anovum B.V., a cybersecurity company.

The most shocking thing I learned was that Synology’s “factory reset” option doesn’t actually delete your data, it just sets a flag to pretend that the device has been reset. Your data won’t disappear from the drive until you build a new volume and format the drives (and even then, most or all of your data may still be on the drive).

The researchers at Anovum had discovered this behavior when investigating after a cyber-attack. They were able to recover their client’s data because the attackers had relied on the same factory reset procedure to erase the data.

Hack the Grid. Disclosing vulnerabilities to help prevent blackouts

This session was a very fun presentation by the three folks from the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD): Chris van t’Hof, Wietse Boonstra, and Frank Breedijk.

Since I used to work on solar system monitoring, I was super interesting in seeing how Wietse pwned his Enphase home solar system.