Amazing, amazing conference! There are over 1700 people here! I have not been to a conference or meetup this cool. It’s so on point and well organized, and just wow. From the training and speakers, to the people and the sheer amount of things to do. The badge. This bade is EPIC with WiFi and IR. You can use your badge to level up and complete contests, games and events. From hacking to puzzles to learning. I am using my Flipper Zero to level up. Just being in a room where learning is happening, your badge will start to level you up. I recorded that signal (it’s an IR signal) with my F0 and I am replaying it in my room, which is leveling me up as I chill and sleep. The minibadge game here is fierce! I had no idea, I also soldered a bunch of my badge extender and that was the first time I have ever soldered.
I arrived Sunday afternoon and walked around Provo a bit, it’s beautiful here! I had dinner and slept well. Monday was a full day of training before the conference started. I chose Penetration Testing – From Start to Finish and it was great. We did some great exercises, using exploits to gain access to a public facing computer then privilege escalation and SSH keys to proxy into a computer on a private network and eventually gaining the flags there. The other was heavy on Cloud and AWS, getting not only an S3 bucket and all it’s secrets, but also creating a snapshot of the FS and then mounting the snapshot to roll the instance. So much fun! I really appreciated the real world insight into Penetration Testing, the practices and the in’s and out’s. I am so jealous of these red teamers!
Today was packed with all kinds of great speakers and workshops. I learned some cool tricks for my Flipper Zero, but to be honest, I already know most of what was talked about and much more. I love to research and poke around topics and the F0 was an itch in my brain that I had to scratch, but I did hear some cool new things to try. You can see the schedule here. I jumped all over the place listening to the things that interested me most.
What I am most impressed with is the community. The hacker community, but also all these communities. Learning and teaching each other is HUGE here. Learning is something that is very important to me, I really appreciate that it’s important here too. Other Infosec/hacker events that I have been to have felt cold and distant. While my imposter syndrome is in full effect and I am around some of the smartest and most successful hackers in the world, I feel welcomed and at east. I want to be a better hacker with every minute that passes here.
There is a HackInTheBox happening from 6-midnight, but I just can’t! My brain is full and my introvert batteries are drained. I need to refuel for tomorrow. So I am working on some of the challenges, but only have passed one. They are hard, especially the crypto ones. Fail, fail, fail, learn — eventually get it. That the process with this stuff. I’ll catch the HITB tomorrow night. I still have 3 days!
Stay kind! I’ll be back tomorrow with another update.
