Sebastian attended Troopers, an IT Security event in Heidelberg (Germany) organized by ERNW GmbH from the 14th to 18th of March 2016. He wants to share his experiences in this blogpost.
Sebastian had the chance to go to Heidelberg in March. He instantly booked the buses and enjoyed learning a lot as well as meeting awesome people.
The conference can be seperated into three parts:
- The trainings took place on the 14th and 15th of March and were one or two day long workshops about different topics. At the same time the IPv6-Security-Summit was held.
- The main conference took place on the 16th and 17th of March.
- The roundtables closed the conference on the 18th March and gave you the chance to discuss chosen topics.
Sebastian applied with a “Student Motivation Letter” for the main conference and was accepted as one of the “Next Generation Hackers”. After a 13 hour long busdrive (from Berlin) he arrived and instantly met two other student-“hackers” in the hostel. The main conference started with an awesome introduction and keynote on wednesday morning. There were around 300 visitors of whom 50 were speakers. The talks were categorized in three seperate tracks:
- Attack & Research
- Defemse & Management
- SAP Security
There were so many interesting talks, it is hard to figure out which to highlight here. Nevertheless, here’s a small list of quite informative talks:
- Casey Smith - Mind The Gap - Exploit Free Whitelisting Evasion Tactics
- Felix Wilhelm - Attacking Next-Generation Firewalls
- Oliver Matula - Imma Chargin Mah Lazer - How to protect against (D)DoS attacks
- Adrian Dabrowski - Hollywood Hacking
- Attila Marosi - How easy to grow robust botnet with low hanging fruits (IoT) - for free
But the talks were not the only attraction at Troopers. The organizers set up an event-only GSM-network and also a local CTF. You can find Sebastian’s writeup for the solutions to the local and PacketWars CTF at 0day.work. PacketWars started right after the shared dinner on wednesday evening. ‘Squareroots’ was the team Sebastian participated in and they won the first place.
Another highlight were the electronic badges which were distributed by the “Badge master” on the second day of the main conference.
Another nice hardware-gadget was a self-soldered USB-condom. The small USB-adapter cuts the data lines and thus allows you to charge your device on an untrusted charger by only powering the device.
All in all one can say, that the event was organized very well. It helped Sebastian’s personal progress and he met a lot of new nice people. He would be happy and is looking forward to participate as a student again next year.
The team of internetwache.org