What you can expect at HITBSecConf2019 Amsterdam
Taking place across 5 days from the 6th till the 10th of May 2019, HITBSecConf2019 Amsterdam is one of the most prestigious cybersecurity events in Europe. With the event celebrating a decade of excellence, we took this opportunity to sit down with Dhillon Andrew Kannabhiran, the Founder and CEO of Hack in The Box, to talk about this year’s conference.
This is the 10th year of HITB Security Conference in Amsterdam! What makes this edition special?
Ten years is a long time in our go-fast, super connected world, and we want to use this year’s conference to not only celebrate our achievements over the last decade, but to also take a look at where our industry is headed as a whole.
Our anniversary years are also when we hold HITB Haxpo – or the HITB hacker expo – a free-to-attend technology exhibition where we celebrate all things hacker! For this year, the theme we have is ‘Hacks of Future Past’.
Every year, some people attend specifically because of the CommSec/Haxpo, what’s special about it?
Apart from the fact that it’s free to attend, the CommSec area is where we house both communities and commercial sponsors in a single area. It’s where you can come and bring your kids to learn more about the culture of hacking – the mindset of a hacker and how to keep that passion burning.
The Haxpo is an extension of this idea and scaled up significantly.
As mentioned, for this year, our theme is ‘Hacks of Future Past’ and we’re setting up the exhibition area as a journey through the years. We’ll start off with a section dedicated to ‘old school’ hacking – things like lock picking, soldering, retro computing.
You then enter the hacks of today. An area which will house our ever-popular Capture the Flag ‘live hacking’ competition, all our sponsors and partners who will be running various contests like wireless signal analysis, SCADA focused challenges and IoT hacking contests.
You’ll also find an area dedicated to hacking medical devices and also a space for researchers to show off their security tools to the public. You’ll get to see demos and even install and play around with these tools on your own machines.
As you exit, you enter the area dedicated to the future of hacking – here you’ll find things like our all-new self driving, self racing car challenge, an area for a blockchain contest run by the all-girl team from HITCON in Taiwan plus a Quantum Computing area which will most likely be coordinated by NYU Abu Dhabi along with Dutch telecommunications provider, KPN.
Your training is renowned in the industry. Which topics still have seats available at the moment?
This year in particular, training classes have filled up much faster than before. Whether it’s an overall indicator that the demand for highly technical, timely, and most importantly relevant training is increasing or if its the fact that its our 10th year anniversary that is driving this, but it’s certainly interesting.
As it stands, there are a few more seats available in handful of classes and I expect they’ll soon fill up as well… If any of you reading this are interested in signing up, better act fast!
What keynotes would you like to highlight?
As it’s our 10th year celebration, I will actually be delivering the opening keynote. I’m going to use the session to recap the amazing journey we’ve but most importantly talk about where we’re headed – what areas are we going to be focused on and where we think we’re going to make the most impact. We’re also going to be announcing a huge HITB event planned for later this year and I’ll be talking about that as well.