The St. Regis ShenZhen, a gorgeous luxury hotel occupying the top 28 floors of a 100-story skyscraper, lets visitors control lighting, temperature, music, TV, the blinds, and other room features with an iPad 2. Unfortunately, the system relies on outdated home automation protocols, which allowed presenter Jesus Molina full control over every wired room in the hotel... even from home. In "The Dangers of Insecure Home Automation Deployment," Molina will explore the implications for large-scale home automation applications, particularly in public settings which leave the venue open to potentially serious liability.

Big data is changing the way things are done, but many organizations' security sensibilities haven't caught up to their wanton usage of Hadoop. Are they taking on too much risk, too quickly? Big data's supposed to generate better, more intelligent predictions, but why should we trust our least-secure systems? Based on Davi Ottenheimer's new book, Realities of Big Data Security, "Babar-ians at the Gate: Data Protection at Massive Scale" will present the author's findings, probing tomorrow's hardest big data problem areas and offering recommendations for today.

Next up, companies and their systems still leak information like a sieve, despite an endless array of security and protection standards and certs. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions are touted as the silver bullet that will save corporations from starring in tomorrow's headlines, but how effective are they, really? "Stay Out of the Kitchen: A DLP Security Bake-Off" will examine the most popular DLP solutions and show you how they really stack up, complete with flaws and exploits.

Finally, today's final Briefing reminds us that on today's Internet both enterprises and individuals are increasingly faced with nation-state class adversaries. Yesterday's tired security dogma (for example, "perimeter defense") is completely inadequate against such an adversary. The presenters of "The Library of Sparta" posit that the collective military wisdom of the last two millennia offers a welcome source of insight, with timeless strategies that can be adapted into effective cyber-security today. Topics will include deception, electronic warfare, operations security, human intelligence collection, psychological operations, and military cryptanalysis, among many others.

Regular registration ends on July 26. Please visit Black Hat USA 2014's registration page to get started.