Bsides Cape Town 2018 - Rite of Passage Talk

so after lunch now we got a quick lightning talk by Eugene who needs to run offs he needs to tell us all about his right of passage he went at last year yeah everyone so I'm sure that most of you are familiar with the rite of passage program but for those who aren't the besides Cape Town group in collaboration with besides Las Vegas and some sponsors send a student every year to well starting last year I believe oh dear lost him yeah send a student to besides Las Vegas and Def Con every year now following and to get a bit of experience what not and I wasn't actually the one that was chosen for last year but

unfortunately the person who was wasn't able to make it so I was second choice which was cool for me very sad for him so yeah a little bit about me who's this guy my name is Eugene I my Twitter is over there I'm trying to restart that since killing my social media not too long ago I'm a CS grad from UW CNU CT I have master's in bioinformatics although it was really a computer science project but tell my supervisor that they get very weird about funding I'm very passionate about DevOps cloud HPC and that and that's a lot of things you find that's currently going on in the academic space especially with software research engineering and all that and

very fond of security and how it applies to the work that I do there and by no means an expert though professional impostor syndrome have them you can come ask me if you need an advice on how to have impostor syndrome and as some of you will know me the intern and I will probably forever be known as that right so a little bit as I explained a little bit about the right passage so as I understand the thought process they figured out that they figured that students are poor and besides kept on as pretty cool sponsors so why don't we take poor students and fly them to DIF Khan and have them experience what it's

like to be part of the global info SEC community and you know make some contacts get some work experience and obviously be forever indebted to be sighs Cape Town and work for the people you know wherever they need work so experiences at besides Las Vegas firstly the light sucks hard a 30 hour flight and I'm difficult to sleeping and I'm waged between people because for some reason I wasn't able to choose my seats because of weird issues with the flight management system and that means I arrived there and I can't understand what people are telling me that's how tired I am but the experience itself once you wake up is incredible it's difficult to describe so I just want to

thank b-cells Las Vegas and especially Banshee on that side they cover the stay for the student while they're at besides as well as Def Con but obviously expect you to do the work to make that justified that they get you to sign up for hours that you want to volunteer at different jobs during the event and they only expect you to work for besides Las Vegas so I'll explain what they've gone now you basically I chose to be a vault floater so moving around different jobs doing speaker operations some of it about Keegan's doing now working AV with the AV company that they brought in you would you know sit behind the camera those kinds of things and

they do check-ins for people whatnot and seriously like the work is is it's brutal they make you work the whole day I mean you want to go out it's Vegas but all you want to do after a day over can't resize is just put your feet up but it's it's incredible to see how well they work that you can see that they've got experience so the thing when you start this conference it's just so many some minimal amount of issues that come up and they're all insignificant so and then obviously you as a student will sneak into the talks that you can while you're on shift and go to the talks that you can while you're off shift and one

thing that I was very impressed by was that it was to see the diversity those their genders and people that are generally considered weird in certain societies are represented and enjoying themselves and free and they have an expressive place you know everybody's just people very awesome to see so Def Con yeah even more difficult to describe it's the conference was spanned over three hotels its Def Con its main speaking venues are in the Caesars pet well at least this year was in Caesars Palace which is in the center of the tripping Vegas and then to other hotels that were hosting workshops and hosting other talks talk tracks there are way too many talks seriously like way too

meaning it's a good thing obviously but it means that you spend the next how much time after the conference watching videos and not doing important things that you're supposed to be doing I bumped into a friend of mine Keith McConnell sure most of you a lot of you are familiar with him and it was just pretty cool because he told me he doesn't really go to that often and yeah we actually went to university together and there are some interesting puzzles and challenges that go around it's like it's like B's it's like besides Las Vegas is besets cave town but unlike 10-fold and then DEFCON is B says Vegas but unlike a bazillion fault so and the Badgers are insane like the

picture here in the bottom right for you guys that's a elastic of Mike he's around here somewhere I don't know if he's in the audience right now there is his badge you built that for the Monaro group with a manera challenge awesome badge if he has any left which I doubt he doesn't don't bother him some really crazy cool stuff to play with so some personal base for me that I took away there was an incredibly interesting talk to me which was called fuzzing malware for fun and profit applying coverage guided fuzzing to find and exploit bugs in modern malware which was talking about how one of the demos in the talk was actually how this guy

buzzed moriah as was mentioned in the previous talk actually before the lunch and discovered that it had a vulnerability where it didn't correctly handle relative URLs of a pass to it so you could actually crash the bot by providing it with this response which is it's it just blew my mind to see the guy do this in action and the villages so many things to learn so many different places you can pop in and from beginner to expert you can just do whatever you need to do figure you know play with new things if you don't have the opportunity to do that elsewhere some non-conference aspects Vegas I'm not gonna what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas right so I'm not

saying anything about that and meeting people and talking about non security related things so so many people were so many vast different experiences in different fields not just security and it's just interesting to get to see what kind of people go to these events and what else you can learn from them just a couple of photos Vegas elastic and poison pixie who sponsored my badge for Def Con so awesome very sad she's not here today yeah and just a little collage of things hilarious to see when you walk to Caesars Palace that they put little googly eyes on all the posters outside and that is a Hummer limo in case anybody is concerned about what it

is yes a Hummer limo because it's Vegas and one funny story I wanted to tell about the Def Con badge is that there were two particular problems with it one that if you reverse the polarity of the batteries they would start spewing battery acid at you and two seemingly the batteries decided to spew acid at you anyway even if you didn't do that so that's what mine looked like after the second day and I was like why are my fingers wait when everybody up so yeah I just wanted to thank everybody at besides caved on it was one hell of an experience and especially grant who couldn't be here today obviously because he's in England now just seriously

helped me out he took care of me when I when I got there sorted me out besides Las Vegas Banshee especially fluffy pony from my man arrow like they sponsored the event the financial contributions repent for keeping me fed news cougar cougar follow me on Twitter and any contributions that people made to the rite of passage program it's I think it's something that that's very valuable I think it's something very good that it's coming out of besides Cape Town other than just the knowledge sharing and it's definitely working towards inspiring students to take up this kind of field and yeah anyone I'm forgetting so thanks