Wednesday, October 07, 2015

Inside ROOTCON IX: Major Highlights

Okay so first things first before giving you some highlights about ROOTCON 9, let's try to have a sneak peek on the comments of the attendees about the venue and some cool shots about it.

Thanks guys for sharing the awesome venue - Taal Vista Hotel in Tagaytay.

More than people turned up to listen to talks on a wide variety of subjects. Aside from Filipino participants, there were also geeks from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, Spain, Malaysia, America, India, etc. who attended the event. Cheers to the attendees who flew to the Philippines just to attend ROOTCON.




Here is the official electronic badge of ROOTCON 9...

And some ROOTCON goons just started the Hacker Badge / Hardware Hacking Village. Thanks guys for taking this initiative.
Mini Hardware Hacking and Hacker Badge Village
Here are some cool topics we had for this year:
  • How to Shot Web: Better Web Hacking in 2015 by Jason Haddix 
  • BackDooring Git by John Menerick 
  • Open Source Internet Infrastructure Insecurity by John Menerick 
  • Unmasking Malware by Christopher Elisan 
  • Hacking Time by Carlos Tingson 
  • Hiding Behind ART by Paul Sabanal 
  • Building Automation and Control: Hacking Energy Saving System  by Philippe Z Lin 
  • Detecting Indicators of a Compromise Using an SDN-Based Network Access Control Implementation by Mon Nunez & Paul Prantilla 
  • Incident Response for Targeted attacks by Jose Ramon Palanco 
  • How safe is my system from reverse engineering by Markku Kero 
  • Fixing CSRF Vulnerabilities Effectively by Lu Zhao 
  • Once more unto the data breach by Steve Miller 
  • Oh My Honey: Honeypots (or honeynets) by Ray Torres 
  • Understanding HTTP/2 by Nathan LaFollette 

I would love to see @caseyjohnellis next year then :)
 Aside from the awesome talks, we had some cool hacker games. WiFi Warrior a.k.a wireless cracking was on the go but sad to say no one won that contest.


ROOTCON CTF was the main highlight of all games in ROOTCON wherein a total of 9 teams joined the said contest. The CTF consists a variety of challenges like stega, crypto, forensics, binary analysis, exploitation and reverse engineering. Yes you read me right that there are exploitation levels! There are 4 boxes that you need to pwn or root for you to find the flag. No one was able to find the flags for the 4 boxes but some boxes were pwned though which is a good one.
Team Handshake handed a total pwnage to the other eight teams because they bagged a total of 4,000 times.


Here is a picture of Team Handshake (the champion of the CTF) together with semprix (the founder of ROOTCON) and I (the jetman).
The Team Handshake (a two-man Team) together with semprix (left) and The Jetman (right)
Congratulations to these two badass guys because they hold the most number of wins in ROOTCON CTF.

One of the coolest part of ROOTCON and any hacker conference are the parties. Yes we had a post-con party which was sponsored by Smirnoff Mule so it was more of a drink till you drop. During the said party, the annual ROOTCON Hacker Jeopardy hosted by DevNull took place.
Jason Haddix (@jhaddix), Nathan LaFollette (@httphacker), and John Menerick (@Lord_SQL) of the Speakers Team won this year's Hacker Jeopardy after a tie-breaker with the new team BRT (winner of the first ROOTCON Campus Tour).
The Winners of the Hacker Jeopardy
So yeah, the ultimate trophy is the Black Badge (the black one).
RC9 ended with an awesome post-con party participated by the speakers, goons, sponsors and of course our con-goers, where the infamous Hacker Jeopardy was also held.



ROOTCON would not be possible without the goons, speakers, sponsors and of course our con-goers. Thanks guys for the support and to the whole InfoSec community. You guys rock!

Stay tuned for more highlights of the conference and the pictures in our Facebook Fanpage.