Hackfest has to be one of my favourite security and hacker conferences. Located in beautiful Quebec City, Quebec, it’s the perfect opportunity to meet up with friends old and new over a good beer, sugar pie and of course poutine.

2018 marked the 10th anniversary of Hackfest, and the second year of the extremely popular Social Engineering CTF. There was a special epic edition of The French Connection podcast – yours truly was invited to join the group to talk about all the things in both French and English, as the glasses kept getting topped up.

Hackfest is known for its excellent trainings before the event, and people come yearly just to participate in the legendary CTF. However, there was so much more to do, and attendees brought their kids along to join in the fun of makerspaces and badges.  I loved getting to try my hand at soldering.

And of course there were the talks. Kudos to my friends Cypher and Pam for an excellent talk on analyzing hacked data services and their tool Breach Analytica.

I shared my thoughts on the evolution of botnets from DDoS annoyances to malware-laden weapons of mass disruption. You can enjoy my talk here: