State of the Pops: Mapping the Digital Waters
Vlatko Kosturjak, MJ Casado
DEF CON 33 (backfill) · Day 1 · Main Stage
In "State of the Pops: Mapping the Digital Waters," MJ Casado and Vlatko Kosturjak present a groundbreaking, passive open-source intelligence (OSINT) investigation into the cybersecurity posture of the global maritime industry. Their talk at the DEF CON Maritime Hacking Village unveils a novel methodology that combines traditional OSINT techniques with the advanced capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and intelligent automation, powered by a custom **Model Context Protocol (MCP)**. This research provides an unprecedented, anonymized overview of digital hygiene and vulnerability exposure across a critical global ecosystem that has historically been under-investigated from a cybersecurity perspective.
AI review
Competent sector-scoped OSINT research with genuinely useful data on maritime cyber hygiene, slightly undercut by the fact that the headline 'novel methodology' is mostly a wrapper around existing tools dressed in MCP automation. The findings are real and the sector is legitimately underexamined, but the technical contribution is thinner than the abstract implies.