Posts tagged shmoocon
HackerMatch
- 23 January 2023
I was fortunate enough to attend ShmooCon with some coworkers this last weekend. This was my first ever cybersecurity conference, so I wasn’t really there with a purpose, mostly just to see what these things are like. One thing I immediately noticed was everyone’s attitude toward the challenges. It seemed that everyone was overwhelmed by how many different challenges there were and how you could really only pick one to complete successfully due to the short duration of the conference.
Some challenges were technical, others were not. One challenge in particular was hosted by Polarity. Essentially, each conference attendee was handed a card when they arrived. The card had a “hash” (really just a long random-looking hex string) and a message saying that seven cards with your hash exist. If you find someone else with a matching hash (hash collision), you can go to the Polarity booth to each claim a prize.