2025-08-05 – 01:00-01:20 (Africa/Abidjan), Florentine F
Laptop stickers are more than colorful pieces of flair. They represent our interests, hopes, goals, and communities. They help us find our tribe in a sea of unknown faces in black shirts. But there is a major danger to the stickers that define ourselves: upgrading our laptops.
Hundreds of poor hackers punish themselves with old and barely usable systems just to retain their rare mementos. After talking with many of these poor souls I've experimented with various methods to remove, retain, and reuse cherished stickers.
This is a conversation on the role of stickers in our communities and learn the right and wrong ways to keep our history alive.
Hi board! This talk came from a conversation at RE//verse con in February where people admitted using old laptops because they didn't want to lose their laptop stickers. Online guides were for sticker removal but not retention. I promised to find some solutions and make it public.
The two sides to this talk are the culture of stickers and the actual how-to of reapplication. They'll likely be 50/50 on time for 20 mins. And lots of pictures throughout.
There are many ways to approach the culture side. I want to hit on:
* general interest side (offsec, dfir, networking, etc. "There's no place like 127.0.0.1")
* specific stances (IDA Pro "No undo, no surrender")
* political statements ("Make Malware Great Again!")
* the Scene (BSides logos, DEFCON, LUGs, other cons)
* just fun ("Five Eyes: Backdoors and Spies")
For tech side I've already started buying chemicals and equipment:
* Heat guns
* questionable ways - WD-40, Goo Gone, Acetone
* Still underway - Heptane, VOC compliant Heptane alternatives, Un-Du, drawing gum
* Techniques - How to separate between adhesive and laptop and not between vinyl and adhesive. Dangers of razor blades. Safety third
* Readhesion - How to not lose the glue but if you do how to appropriately add more
I plan on continuing the research between now and the con. I've done enough work to know the good and bad ways, but now want to explore variations on them. I'm trying to find someone to sacrifice a laptop to let me test the limits of burning into the screen.
Brian Baskin is a Threat Researcher with a specialty in incident response, threat intel, and malware analysis. Baskin was previously an intrusions analyst for the US Defense Cyber Crime Center and a threat research lead at Carbon Black's Threat Analysis Unit (TAU). He has studied and presented research on cyber threats for over 20 years. He has authored multiple security books and develops open source tools for more efficient IR and malware analysis.