Last Thursday we held our first Ethical Hackers Meetup at the Alcampo Lounge in Brighton. The meetup was aimed at anyone interesting in hacking whether they are just starting to learn about hacking or a seasoned professional. We were absolutely delighted by the turnout of a wide range of people who wanted to take part and come along for some beers, food and of course hacking!
The Brighton tech scene is booming with some truly amazing businesses across the city pushing the boundaries of innovation. With such a wealth of talent we felt that the meetup would be an ideal opportunity for hackers to get together to make new connections, share best practice and crack some of the fiendish challenges our testers meticulously reconstructed on our labs.
We wanted to make the meetup as inclusive as possible so we created a range of challenges so everyone could get involved and test their hacking skills whatever their experience level.
The challenges we set
On the night we had 4 labs running;
- Practice – OWASP BWA & Metaploitable 1,2,3 etc.
- Easy – 10 machines this included a relatively simple MS17-010 vulnerability and several other point and click exploits.
- Medium – 8 machines, a bit trickier allowing people to use brute forcing, exploiting web applications, SQLi and uploading reverse shells.
- Hard – 5 Machines (and a few which were hidden) this presented a tough challenge with buffer overflows, reverse engineering & binary exploitation.
The hackers set to work on tackling all the challenges and it was fantastic to see so much collaboration and coaching on the techniques used by everyone involved.
We would like to say a big thank you to everyone who came along and to the Alcampo Lounge for hosting us!
Get involved
If you are interested to attend our next Hacker Meetup then please join our group where you can learn more about next event: https://www.meetup.com/Brighton-Ethical-Hacker-Meetup/
If you are interested in the following this is the event for you:
- Bug Bounties
- Capture the flag
- Ethical Hacking
- Programming
- Wifi Hacking