Although I have been working for 10 years, taking part in Black Hat Europe 2017 is actually my first business trip ever.
The first 2 days (December 4th ~ 5th) were for trainings, and I attended Advanced Infrastructure Hacking – 2017 Edition. This course is comprehensive and covers a lot of hacking techniques. The primary harvest which I get includes following parts:
a) Many network related knowledge. E.g., I got a recap of basics of IPv4/IPv6, and learned the usage of command line tools: nmap,SNMP, arp-scan, etc. Since I have great interest in socket programming, and maybe I should spend time in reading the source code of these tools, and share it if possible, like what I have done with netcat: Learn socket programming tips from netcat.
b) Linux hacks. Since I mostly use Linux in my daily life, this part is really impressive and teach me some caveats which I can’t pay enough attention to: uid and euid, the sticky bit, and so on. BTW, Because I worked for a telecommunication software company before,VoIP hacks is another area which I am familiar with.
c) Some awesome websites, like https://www.rebootuser.com/ and https://www.shodan.io/.
For other parts of the training, as I don’t have much hands-on experience on them, honestly, I didn’t inhale too much knowledge.
The following 2 days (December 6th ~ 7th) is for social events: briefings, arsenal and business networking. Because of the budget, I didn’t take part in briefings which the speakers gave talks about one specific security area. My primary task is to seek potential partners who have interest in encrypting data field. Fortunately, even most attended companies concentrate on firewall, safer data access, data monitor, etc; there are still few corps have tastes on this “niche” technology. So after my back to company, we will communicate further. BTW, another Fintech event was held in the same building simultaneously, so this is truly “kill two birds with one stone”.
Besides the content aforementioned, I also knew some new friends. For example, some guy took part in both training and briefings at his own expense; that gave me a real deep impression.
In summary, I have a rich gain during this trip, and hope to take part in more events like this in the future. London, see you again~