I've had a very busy month! I've been working on contract work in the evenings and working 9 - 5.30 in HEAnet during the day. At the beginning of the month I also registered a Business (SecurIT.ie ) to gain some more experience and put my ethical hacking and information security services certificate to better use. The best way to learn is through doing, and hell have I been doing a lot...Hopefully I've learned many things :)
I was keeping my eye on twitter and noticed there was a great conference taking place in Trinity college Dublin by the name of Source Conference It had a great line up of speakers/talks that I couldn't miss. Thankfully I won some tickets from the very generous I then attended and was amazed by the presentations. Some very interesting and incredible people/topics.
I attended both Thursday and Friday of the conference (thanks to my boss allowing me take the time to attend!) and thoroughly enjoyed it. It has pretty much solidified the idea in my head that it's the area of work I'd like to pursue or gain expertise in, it's just so damn fun/interesting.
Myself and a friend (Vadim >.>) also attended the Capture the flag competition that was hosted in Facebook's Dublin office in association with Facebook, and the Source Conference. Here is the for the event. We came in 6th/7th place out of 14 teams with only 2 on our team (most teams had 4) and enjoyed the whole event immensely, Facebook were very good hosts! The best we achieved was getting a shell on one of the servers nobody else did through a web app, happy days!
There were some very talented people there and it was an overall good experience. We had a guy join our team in the last 40 minutes or so, who completed one of the heavyweight reverse engineering challenges literally less than a minute after they pulled the plugs. That would have moved us up into 4th or 5th place, what a pity! I most definitely will be attending more capture the flags in future, they are great exercises for your skills and always a bit of craic!