Monday 26 June 2017

Security BSides Athens 2017


This was the second Security BSides Athens in Greece this year, which allowed us to move to a slightly bigger venue. We tried to put together a better event since last year and further improve the quality of the conference.

Security BSides Athens 2017 (www.bsidesath.gr) took place at "The Athinais Cultural Center" - ATHINAIS




This year we managed to reach 230 attendees in total, we had 2 Tracks for talks, and 1 Track for a workshop and a CTF. 
You will find photos from the day on our Facebook album. We also recorded the talks and these will be made available on our YouTube channel. 

We tried to turn the CTF into a realistic scenario, while demonstrating the ethical side of hacking. More specifically:

CTF Scenario: You are a security consultant at a large organisation. Your CEO, in a recent trip abroad decided to buy a cool gadget and bring it back to the office. This gadget is allegedly a “smart-safe” that the owner is able to lock/unlock it, through the use of a smartphone. Unfortunately, the CEO locked the smart-safe and got the smartphone destroyed (dropped in water). The CEO is now panicking because it is very important to get the smart-safe opened again and asks every security consultant in the firm if they can help by “hacking” the smart-safe, forcing it to open. Do you think you can help your CEO by getting the smart-safe to open?

We also did our Treasure Hunt which allowed all attendees to participate using their mobile phones. The winners from both the CTF and the Treasure Hunt, where given Raspberry Pi Linux-based mini computers and information security & cybersecurity related books by O'Reilly Media, which were again this year our Bronze sponsor. We also had small competitions and prize draws by the Sponsors. 

Due to the high demand, all of our free tickets were going really fast. So, this year we decided to include a ticket category which allowed us to gather some money for one of the most well-known charities for children in Greece: 
"The smile of the child" (www.hamogelo.gr) 

In other words, anyone who missed the opportunity to reserve one of the free tickets, had the option to get a ticket for the conference for a price, with the exception that the whole amount for that ticket, was being donated to the charity. This allowed us to gather 250 Euros, for "The smile of the child" and we are very proud that we managed to gather this amount. The charity honored us by sending the psychologist Dr. Stefanos Alevizos to give an opening talk about the charity and its mission, and the ODYSSEAS program, which is a Mobile Lab of Information, Education & Technology.

We had an amazing line up of speakers from all over the world. Special Thanks goes out to Dave Lewis who traveled all the way from the US to deliver the keynote "Falling on Swords". 

Of course, goes without saying that we could not do this if it was not for our sponsors. A big Thank You goes out to our Sponsors, who supported the conference and the information security community. 

Platinum: 
www.twelvesec.com
www.encodegroup.com

Gold:
www.invinsec.com
www.neurosoft.gr

Silver:
www.tigerscheme.org

Bronze:
www.oreilly.com
www.bitcrack.net

After-Party:
www.memset.com

Community Support (Sponsors):
www.securitybsides.com
www.securitybsides.org.uk/
www.bsidesmcr.org.uk/
www.unipi.gr/unipi/en/
www.aegean.gr/aegean2/#
www.bsidesams.nl
isc2-chapter.gr
www.peerlyst.com
isrg.blogs.southwales.ac.uk
44con.com
www.shellterproject.com
www.herts.ac.uk/cybersecurity
www.cybersecurity.gr
www.army.gr
www.owasp.org/index.php/London
www.ionio.gr/central/gr/
hostunknown.tv
rawhex.com

This year we also held a t-shirt logo competition. Paola Karathanasi (@PMKarathanasi) was the winner of our Security BSides Athens 2017 t-shirt logo competition!
We hope to see you all back in 2018. We look forward to another successful event and to many more activities on the day. If you would like to be part of Security BSides Athens 2018, as a sponsor, speaker, volunteer, drop us an email. More information at: www.bsidesath.gr

Follow us on Twitter: @BSidesATH

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