Advance Tech Media recently attended Black Hat USA 2018 one of the world’s premier cybersecurity conferences held August 3 - 9 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, NV. With an estimated 20,000 attendees this year Black Hat was arguably one of the largest gatherings of information security professionals and companies. Now in its 21st year, Black Hat USA provides attendees with the very latest in research, development and trends. The conference included four days of technical trainings (August 4 – 7) followed by the two-day main conference (August 8 – 9) featuring Briefings, Arsenal, the Business Hall, and much more.
Attendees could view the conference network operation centre and Mike from Kismet Wireless was kind enough to give us a run down on the mobile monitoring station aka the pineapple - an open source wireless network intrusion detection system. We met with a number of interesting vendors in the Business Hall and came back with a ton of cool swag - most of which we’ll be giving away at the next few Advance Tech Socials and other meetups here in Vancouver.
One of my personal highlights was meeting Kevin Mitnick during his live security demo, showing why privacy and guarding your data is important, and getting two signed copies of Kevin’s latest book The Art of Invisibility - thank you kindly Kevin!!
The coverage of Black Hat USA would not be complete without mentioning DEF CON 26. At the beginning of August, Las Vegas experiences a unique convergence of infosec and cybersecurity professionals, ethical hackers, hackers, engineers, and agents representing various governments, corporations, universities and communities. Combined with temperatures in the low 40s - celcius (each day was well over 100 degrees F) these groups mixed and co-mingled up and down the Las Vegas Strip and surrounding areas. Was it madness - a little. Mayhem? No.
Sure there were a few blue screens and depending on how well you understand securing your devices - you may not have wanted to hop on to any of the local or hotel wireless networks. There were also new hotel security checks and policies which were generally considered over-reaching regardless of how well intentioned they may have been when conceived. There were extraordinary numbers of blinking lights including the DEF CON 26 badges which - if solved - would lead to a coveted black badge which conveys lifetime conference access.
We went to the HackerOne h1-702, Hacker Holiday Event where there were over $450K in bounties paid out. While there was some socialising we were surprised to see groups of people focused on progressing successfully through bug bounties. As always, in Vegas the nightlife is pervasive but the general theme in middle of summer amidst the heat of the desert was that of people hacking on ideas and having fun. Without mentioning names we enjoyed the conversations and look forward to attending both conferences again in the future!