HITB conference proper kicks off today
By Digital News Asia October 10, 2012
- Triple-track conference – no keynotes, no sales pitches – starts today with international legends
- Many side-events as well, including a bug-hunt offering US$2mil rewards in total, and a charity auction
THE 10th edition of the Hack In The Box Security Conference (HITBSecConf2012) kicks off in Kuala Lumpur today (Oct 10) after two days of technical training and workshops, bringing back on stage 42 of the series’ most popular speakers of the past decade.
These include hacker legend John ‘Captain Crunch’ Draper; info-security legend Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer at F-Secure; Lucas Adamski, director of security engineering at Mozilla; and Peter ‘Brokep’ Sunde and Fredrik ‘Tiamo’ Neij, the founders of The Pirate Bay; and DNS guru Paul Vixie.
The iOS Dream Team of experts who have unleashed many jailbreak tools and carrier unlocks will also be there; as will Chris Evans, who leads security for Chrome at Google; and founder of The Hackers’ Choice (THC) Marc ‘Van Houser’ Heuse.
“We’re extremely grateful to all our speakers, sponsors and volunteers who have helped us reach a decade of playing host to the brilliant minds that have helped shaped the security landscape to where it is today,” HITB founder Dhillon Andrew Kannabhiran said earlier.
HITBSecConf2012 (or HITB2012KUL) includes a number of side events, such as the Capture The Flag network hacking challenge; the HackWEEKDAY 36-hour hackathon which made its first appearance at last year’s conference; and the HITB CommSec Village, an area that would be dedicated to highlighting various security related projects from the open source community and from various hackerspaces.
Free and open to public, the CommSec Village will feature more showcases from open source communities and various organizations, including an expanded lock-picking arena by members of TOOOL USA (The Open Organization of Lock Pickers).
HackWEEKDAY, is also back, now in a longer, 36-hour hackathon format with developers invited to work on enhancing or developing browser extensions or work on hardware based projects involving Microsoft’s Kinect motion controller and the open-source RaspberryPi project.
In addition, Google has announced Pwnium 2 - putting a total of US$2 million in rewards on the table for anyone who can find bugs in its browser, exploit them, and tell Google’s security team the details of their techniques.
There will also be a charity auction just before the closing ceremony on Oct 11, with all proceeds going to the Needy Cancer Patient Fund managed by Mount Miriam Cancer Hospital, a hospital located in the northern Malaysian island of Penang whose goal is to make treatment affordable to all cancer patients.
Among the items up for grabs are various t-shirts, devices and collectibles, with the piece de resistance being a one-of-a-kind XBox 360 exclusively designed by Microsoft for HITB2012KUL. The winning bidder will have the option of having his or her name featured.
For more information on HITBSecConf2012, go to http://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2012kul/ or follow the @hitbsecconf Twitter account for up-to-the-minute updates. The hashtag for the event is #HITB2012KUL.
Digital News Asia is amongst the official media for the event.
