Monday, September 07, 2015

ROOTCON Campus Tour Highlights


"Why can’t we have our own hacker event for the university students too? "

This is one of the questions I asked to semprix (father of ROOTCON) before visualizing the ROOTCON Campus Tour which is an information security seminar and an inter-university Hacker Capture the Flag (CTF) for university students in the Philippines. I suggested it will be fun too.

We also want to give back something to the community because we want the event to be free, we want to promote security awareness, and that we want to introduce the essence of the hacker culture.

And so we pushed the event last September 4, 2015 at De La Salle University in cooperation with DLSU - College of Computer Studies, Mr. Isaac Sabas of Pandora Security Labs, and La Salle Computer Society. The event was also sponsored by Booster C Energy.

Participants came from De La Salle University, Mapua Institute of Technology, Ateneo de Manila University, University of Sto. Tomas, UP Diliman, PUP, etc.
semprix announcing the mechanics for the CTF
Dan Duplito's Hacking 101 Session

The morning session was opened by a warm welcoming remarks from Isaac Sabas followed by Dan Duplito's topic entitled 'Hacking 101'. Dan's topic is a definitive guide for newbies and how to have a fair share of hacking. After the Hacking 101 session, Raymond Nunez talked about 'Øwning Your InfoSec Career' which deals on how to charge your way to an Information Security or IT Security career. The last topic for the seminar was all about 'Bug Hunting 101' by Ray Torres which talks about how to earn cash rewards by reporting vulnerabilities in a company that offers a bug bounty program just like Facebook and Google. 

Overall the goal of the seminar is to provide topics like Information Security 101, Information Security Career 101, and Introduction to Hacking, Exploit Development, Malware Analysis, and Debugging.

The afternoon session highlighted the main event which is the first ever inter-university hacker Capture the Flag (CTF) Challenge in the Philippines. Yes! This is how ROOTCON organizes its own hacker cup and hacker games which is packed with intermediate to advance challenges like reverse engineering, return oriented programming, packet sniffing, packet analysis, debugging, web exploits, and many more to mention.
Looks like guys from UP Diliman are having fun
Cat - one of ROOTCON's CTF Committee for the Campus Tour
Jami (the grand emcee) and shipcod3 overseeing the participants from La Salle
The CTF challenge or game was a very close fight between the teams from PUP and UP! 


Yep! The winner of the first-ever hacker CTF challenge of ROOTCON Campus Tour is TeamBRT from PUP Computer Science Department with a total of 1100 points. Team New Beast from PUP Computer Engineering Department bagged the second place with a total of 1050 points and Eskrima of UP Diliman finished third with 1000 points. 

Congratulations to TeamBRT and for that you guys earned your free pass to ROOTCON 9!!! w00t!!

Your school is proud of you! PSSST! PUP please give these guys some cookies!