HackenProof visit to Hacker Summer Camp

At the beginning of August Hacken and HackenProof team have visited the largest Hacker convention in the world – Hacker Summer Camp 2018.

We’ve prepared a short intro into the term, in case you’re not familiar with it:

Hacker Summer Camp is a combination of three events that are held each summer in Las Vegas – Black Hat USA, BSides Las Vegas and DEF CON. It is the largest gathering of cybersecurity experts, hackers and tech enthusiasts. The audience size has been growing steadily since the inception, and in 2018 more than 30 000 people have attended these events.

A logical question comes to mind “why are there three events instead of one”? Well, as conference grew in size, it started to break up into more “focused” events:

It all started with DEF CON in 1993. Basically, it’s the main event of the camp with the largest number of people attending the conference. With time it became more and more “mainstream” and today cybersecurity companies just use it as a platform to show off their brand to the mass market. Anyone can attend.

Interesting fact – since it’s a hacker’s convention, it is advised to leave your laptop at home and not use your personal cell phone. Anyone is at risk getting hacked here. If you want to buy something – you’ll have to use cash.

Black Hat USA (also known as Black Hat Briefings)

This is a more corporate-focused event. Here is our product manager Evgenia Broshevan with the CEO of Hacken – Dmytro Budorin, standing next to a giant “Black hat” logo

Black Hat is broken down into “Briefings” (talks) and “Trainings.” The event itself is quite expensive and the content is very high quality. The audience here is almost exclusively cybersecurity professionals from the corporate sector.

Due to a large number of presentation submissions to Black Hat USA in 2009, the rejected presentations were presented at a separate event. This is how BSides Las Vegas was born. It runs at the same time as Black Hat Briefings. It’s sort of a “budget” version of Black Hat, with much fewer people than at DEF CON, and less “corporate” than Black Hat.

There are dozens of corporate parties and events running alongside Hacker Summer Camp, so in total HackenProof team has attended 12 events in 7 days (yeah, that was a hell of a schedule).

This was a great opportunity for us to meet the fellow hackers and invite them all to our upcoming onsite bug bounty marathon Hacken Cup:
Here we are with Sandeep Singh (aka Geekboy). We even have a video with the bad boy from the last year’s event

We’ve also been very fortunate to meet Tanner (@itscachemoney) and Jack Cable

Apart from catching up with active members of our community, we have also spent some time chatting with our colleagues from bug bounty sphere We believe that Bug Bounty Platform industry is still developing and that sharing our experiences, benefits the industry as a whole. After all, we are in the same business – we are all fighting for a safe cyberspace.

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