ROOTCON Blog

During ROOTCON 10, we introduced a new dedicated track for our Capture The Flag, with the comfortable CTF tables and chairs the game was well participated and was enjoyed by most of the players, not just the players enjoyed the game but as well as the spectators passing by. With the Chill-out track near by the CTF area you'll be tempted to Hack All The Drinks and Drink All The Booze.

Kudos to The Illuminated Beings for coming up with a very awesome challenges.




Here are the Statistics.

Do you have the guts to earn the ROOTCON Black Badge? Then this is for you, ROOTCON 9 Capture The Flag pre-registration is now open.

You may now pre-register at  CTF Pre-registration Form

What is Capture The Flag?

The most mind-buggling game at ROOTCON, get ready for the RC9 Capture The Flag.

Our Capture The Flag this year will have two stages:

Stage 1 - Hacker Jigsaw - you will be presented with puzzles coming from different areas for security such as forensics, web app testing, cryptography, network analysis, wireless security and many more.

Stage 2 - Pawnstar - there will be boxes to p4wn each box corresponds to a certain point.

Prize:
3000 worth of Sodexo + 3 ROOTCON Black Badge
OR
4 ROOTCON Black Badge

On the day registration

During Day 1 registration please approach a registration goon and ask that you will register for the CTF.

What are you waiting for? Get that black badge and bring home your bragging rights.

We have good rates for our partners in cooperation with our hotel partners.

The following are the rates per night:

Taal Vista Hotel - Deluxe Room  http://www.taalvistahotel.com/

Twin sharing - Php5000.00 with breakfast buffet for two.
Additional head - Php1850.00 with breakfast.


The Lake Hotel - Standard Room http://www.lakehoteltagaytay.com/

Twin Sharing - Php4060.00 with breakfast buffet for two.

Direction from Lake Hotel to Taal Vista



To book your hotel email us at comms [at] rootcon dot org with the following info:

Subject: Hotel Booking (Taal Vista / Lake Hotel)

Name:
Email Address:
Mobile number:
Check-in:
Check-out:
Mode of payment: Credit Card / Cash:

Visit them at https://www.pandoralabs.net/

We always want everyone to come and join us, ROOTCON is giving away 10% discount from regular rate. Just type-in the promo code "hackallthethings" and get that discount!

What are you waiting for? Register now at https://www.rootcon.org/xml/rc9/register

credits to the owner of the photo

Date and Venue
The largest annual hacker conference in the country ROOTCON will celebrate its 7th year this coming September 12-14, 2013. The first day which is September 12 will be packed with workshops and training organized by our very own NexSquare Inc. followed by the con proper on September 13th and 14th.  After a considerable days of negotiating our venue to cater more attendees we came up with a verdict that we will be returning to Parklane International Hotel in Cebu City.

Activities and Workshops
This year our very own NexSquare Inc. are kind enough to organize workshop on the first day of the conference. Some of the pre-final workshops are as follows:

WiFu - Introduction to Wireless Security
Hacking 101 - Introduction to Hackery
Lockpick 101 - Introduction to LockPicking
Metasploit-Fu - Ninja training on Metasploit
Web App Security - Introduction to Web Application Penetration Testing

These workshops are introductory to trainings offered by NexSquare Inc. with a very reasonable price to CON-Goers.

We also have our pre-con activities; activities like:

WiFi Shootout
Pre-con gathering (H4xor BBQ)

Pricing
We wanted ROOTCON to stay the cheapest and yet the best hacker conference in town; we were able to maintain the price of Php2800.00 for two consecutive years; however economically our materials and logistics costs increased so in order to cover all of our expenses such us speakers airfare and accommodation, badges, swags, meals and venue we came up with a slight price increase, this is also in parallel to the price our venue is giving us. The price for this year's conference are as follows:

Early Pro Registration: Php3300.00
Early Student Registration: Php2800.00
Group of 5 Registration: Php14025 (less 15%)

Late Pro Registration: Php4300.00
Late Student Registration: Php3800.00

Stay tuned for regular updates on the following

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rootcon
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/_rootcon_
Forum: http://forum.rootcon.org
Main Site: https://www.rootcon.org

We hope to see everyone at ROOTCON this year!!!!

Hackers Unite

All the best,
-semprix

Around 15:00 while upgrading the ROOTCON systems one of the ROOTCON Goons reported that there was a hacking incident on Sulit (an online buy and sell portal http://www.sulit.com.ph) the incident was claimed by ROOTCON.ORG and ANONYMOUS.

The Sulit website was replaced by the homepage of Ayosdito.ph, another classified ads portal in the country. Also, the title of the hacked page states: “ROOTCON.ORG We are anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget.” 

Sulit.com.ph temporarily shut down its site, and issued an advisory to the public via Twitter @sulit:“A relatively simple attack was made against us. We should be back online and back to normal in a few minutes. To be clear, only a 3rd-party vendor was compromised; our data, application, and servers were unaffected and are intact.”   source: http://infolikes.com/internet/sulit-com-ph-website-hacked/

The ROOTCON core group is composed of high level security professionals, we always ensure we observe proper ethics through responsible full-disclosure if given one of our members found a serious vulnerabilities on certain web application or network. The internet is a free world to live anyone can easily tag and use the name ROOTCON as part of their hacking adventure. ROOTCON is not an underground group we are a legitimate group registered under Security and Exchange Commission, we only provide neutral venue where enterprise, government and underground share best practice, latest trends and cutting edge security techonologies.

On behalf of ROOTCON and its Goons I would like to inform everyone that ROOTCON and its crew does not condone illegal activities like this and we are not part of the hacking incident that occurred. The attack was acknowledged by certain group which is NOT part of ROOTCON. This incident is another heads-up to our security professionals and system administrators to take information security seriously; its a crazy world out there.


Check out the Official Sulit Press Release

semprix (The Fork Meister)

Early Registration for ROOTCON 6 ended yesterday July 16, 2012 at exactly 12 midnight.

Regular rate registration is now open until August 17, 2012, since we want you to come!!! we are still giving away discounts get our group of 5 package and get 10% off.

What are you waiting for REGISTER NOW!!!!

http://rootcon6.eventbrite.com/
https://www.rootcon.org/xml/rootcon6/register

This year we introduce to you "The Secrecy" is composed of 10 levels, each levels has a secret / hidden phrase or word that you need to find for the players to proceed to the next levels.

Let the cracking begin!!!

Game Mechanics 
The objective of this game is to reach the top-most level which is level 10. In order to achieve that you need to pass each level and get the secret / hidden phrase or word.

The Rules 
1. NO DIRECT DDoS on the game servers.
 2. NO Physical Coercion on players and crew.
 3. Spies works on their own, this is a single player game. You can however have a handler to coach you throughout the game.
 4. Spies are resourceful breaking codes, so be like one ;-)
 5. Bring your own spy gears, laptop, AP, GPS tracking, whatever you think you will need.

Who Can Play 
Any ROOTCON attendee (except for the ROOTCON Goons).

When 
Start of the conference

Prizes Shining UberH4x0r Badge, which entitles you to be put up on the ROOTCON Hall of Fame, free entrance on the next ROOTCON Conference.

Crew / Agents / Handlers 
Encrypted84 Semprix (The Fork Meister)

More details at https://www.rootcon.org/xml/rootcon6/activities#secrecy

At ROOTCON we value everyone....CON-Goers, Sponsors and Partners. This year we are giving away our sponsors the opportunity to talk about what they do, this year we introduced "SpeedTalks". SpeedTalks is available to all major participating sponsors for ROOTCON 6.

The mechanics is pretty straight forward.

1. Avail one of the Major Sponsors of ROOTCON 6

• Platinum
• Gold
• Silver

2. Sponsoring company will send a delegate for their entry on SpeedTalks.
3. Sponsoring companies are given a blazing 10 minutes for their product demo / presentation and product updates.
4. SpeedTalks will be given on Day 1 and Day 2.
5. ROOTCON will align all schedules to the sponsoring company representatives.
6. NO QUESTIONS should be entertained during the SpeedTalk, the allotted 10 minutes is purely presentation / demo / talk. All questions should be addressed on the sponsors booth.

What are you waiting for? Contact our sponsorship liaison.

-Semprix

ROOTCON 6 Call For Papers is now close, we would like to thanks everyone who submitted. For those who were not accepted you can still enjoy the fun at ROOTCON by registering, socialize, network, learn and have fun.

New CFP submission has landed our Inbox.

Topic Details

Presentation Title: Randomized/Obfuscated Text Detection
Synopsis: Recent malwares have been using obfuscation techniques to hide its code from Antivirus software. Making use of emulation is very effective but would probably result in a slow performing machine especially when your valid apps are getting scanned from malwares. Thus, before a full emulation can be done, a static detection can help minimize this slow performance. Detecting the existence of obfuscated text segregates valid applications from malwares. This topic shows different methods on how to determine if a certain text is rather randomized.


Speaker: Reginald Wong
Speaker Background: Reggie has been in the anti-malware industry for almost 10 years doing research on different types of malwares. He currently heads the heuristics team at GFI Software Philippines and aims to detect malwares before they get in to your system.


More at https://www.rootcon.org/xml/rootcon6/tracks

We want you to able to join the fun and learning we share at ROOTCON, with that we made it easy for everyone to get approval from you boss and HR personnel. You may download our pre-formatted and digitally signed Letter Of Approval.

Download the Letter Of Approval  

This year's ROOTCON is much awesome with our selected tracks and carefully planned activities. April 1, 2012 we are pleased to announce that the early registration for ROOTCON 6 is now live.

Our updated tracks (here) updated real time
Our awesome speakers (here)
This year's venue (here)


Last year we had two Registration methods: Paypal and Offline payment (manually sending out email to registration [at] rootcon dot org). The tagging of attendees was pretty hard for the ROOTCON crew, thus, this year we opted to have a new registration system which is EventBrite. You will still have the option to pay offline or pay through PayPal but the up-side for us is that tagging of attendees and slots is much more precise, so we won't be re-opening the registration over and over again after we recount our available slots.

On the new registration system there will still be offline payments through direct deposit and there will also be PayPal payments. You will still receive an e-ticket for the event marked as payment-not-received, however, your reservation will stay on the system for 48 hours, FAILURE OF PAYMENT WITHIN 48 HOURS WILL FORFEIT YOUR RESERVATION. If you deposited your payment already, send us a copy of the scanned deposit slip to registration [at] rootcon dot org with subject [ROOTCON 6 REGISTRATION - YOUR NAME] and we will be sending you another e-ticket marked as payment-received. For Paypal payment you will receive your e-ticket right away after you purchase them.

PRINT YOUR E-TICKET and BRING THEM TO THE CONFERENCE CHECK-IN DESK TO RECEIVE YOUR BADGE AND OTHER FREEBIES

What our you waiting for GRAB YOUR TICKET NOW!!!!

See you at the CON
Semprix and the ROOTCON Crew

A new activity will be introduced this coming ROOTCON 6, the new activity will be mocked as H4X()R BBQ, seriously what is H4X()R BBQ? The event will be a precon activity where all ROOTCON 6 attendees gather around and have some BBQ and Alcohol moments together while getting to know each and everyone.

H4X()R BBQ will take part on the 6th of September 2012 a day before the conference proper, it will be mixed with other activity mocked as WiFi Shootout.

More information will be decimated on the ROOTCON 6 website so stay tuned for updates.