THOTCon & Bsides Chicago

Well I’ve had a few days to recover from the awesomeness that is the Chicago Con Weekend. This year I was able to ride/stay with a friend from GrrCon who was attending with some coworkers, meaning the base for operations was in the city. This proved to be good for location but only average for room quality.

Friday morning we headed to THOTCon for networking, beer, food, talks, and just all-around awesomeness. Although I didn’t see all the talks I wanted, or the people I wanted to meet, I was able to catch the keynote, Ben Ten’s “Creating A Powerful User Defense Against Attackers”, James Arlen’s “The Message and The Messenger”, Cyberwar” with Josh Corman & Jericho, PhreakingGeek’s “Y U No Sanitize bro?” and David Schwartzberg’s “Fun with Exploit Kits for Tech Support”. You can find the information (but no recordings) at www.thotcon.org

Most of the talks I was able to see were good (the ones that weren’t don’t read my blog anyway). The information presented was relevant, and the speakers held their own on stage. James’ talk about presenting will help when I speak at GrrCon later this year, but I think the Cyberwar talk was by far my favorite. So much information was condensed into an hour talk it was hard to take it all in. What I did like was the discussion about the audience being a “cyber militia”. You do have to wonder if we all had to “fight” online, how many casualties would there be?

Saturday morning had us on the way to Bsides Chicago. This was set to be my first CTF experience and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I brought pretty much every piece of electronics I own with me and the weight of it tore my backpack. Learning how a CTF works and banging my head against the wall for most of the day was ironic when Nicolle Neulist’s talk about how to start with a CTF was at the end of the day 🙂

The CTF itself was not only brain-draining but a lot of fun! The challenges were set out in groups based on easy/hard/etc. When you get so close to solving one without knowing exactly what they are looking for, it can be frustrating, but seeing the points go up on the board makes it worth it. I was able to capture 8 flags total in what I feel was a respectable showing for a first-timer!

The THOTCon after-party was in downtown and had good food and drinks as well as DualCore on the mic for a short period. More people were met, more hands shaken, and more networking all the people!

All-in-all it was a great weekend and I’m glad I was able to see/make friends and most importantly learn a lot! Looking forward to Source Conference Dublin in a few weeks so I will see some of you again soon!