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NULLCON is one of the best information security conference in India and every year everyone from the InfoSec community attends it. I have a great interest in Security and hacking ( If you follow my blog you will probably know it already ) and yes I too look forward to the conference. Every year most of my friends who are into security attend NULLCON. I failed to go last year due to my Exams and last to last year i had my class 12 boards exam.
This time I wanted to attend it . But then the task is not so easy. I visited NULLCON’s website to buy a pass but the cost was too much ( at least for students ) And since I’m from Northeast India there is no direct flight to Goa ( NULLCON venue ) and if i take train then it would take almost 4 days to reach goa and my college won’t allow to take leave for such a long duration. So the total cost of travel and event pass was way too much so i thought I’ll have to drop this time too.
But then i got to know about Garage4Hackers community providing free passes to those who have contributed to open source community. I was not sure if i should try or not but then i thought lets give it a try. So i provided them some of my contributions in InfoSec and and work and to my surprise I got selected and got the Indian student delegate pass for nullcon and i decided that I’LL GO TO NULLCON THIS YEAR.
On 2nd march 2017 i started my journey from guwahati and reached goa via mumbai. YES FINALLY GOA. I was damn excited for the next day.
Next day I reached hotel Holiday Inn at around 9am . Kaza and his friends were waiting for me and then we entered together. WOW the place was simply awesome. We directly went to the exhibition area and visited various booths that were set up there. I finally met Rahul Sasi sir. He is a great guy. He was representing his company Cloud Sec. He gave me a hackers cheat sheet and we clicked photos.
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| With Rahul Sasi |
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| Finally met these awesome people |
There were a lot of CTFs going on in the exhibition area and I took part in few. I won a power bank, Pen drive, Lots of t-shirts from these CTFs. It was a great experience. After that I met a lot of people whom i earlier met online.
Most of the talk in nullcon were great and was very informative. i attended few talk like
1. How to be successful in azure bug bounty by michael Hendrickx.
2. Drone Hijacking and other IoT hacking with GNU Radio and SDR by Arthur Garipov.
3. Hacking medical device and infrastructure by anirudh duggal.
4. 7 sins of ATM protection against logical attacks by timur yunusov.
I did not attend much talks as i was busy meeting new people, taking part in CTFs and eating. A lot of companies who are related to security came to nullcon and it was a great opportunity to know what is the latest things that are going on in security. Also I got internship offer from few of the companies that visited nullcon.
I know a lot of people online who are into security and nullcon was the best platform to meet them in person also I made lots of friends there.
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| With Himanshu sharma |
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| With the Nullcon Crew and Govt. Officials |
Also I made a small video about the overall experience of Nullcon, goa and meeting friends. Do watch it.
Conclusion
It was a great experience. Many people say that we can watch the talk online too why to spend so much money going to conference? the thing is the experience that we get when we visit conferences like is something that cannot be get just by watching the talk videos. I would like to thank all the awesome people of Garage4Hackers for giving me the pass as without it I might have not been able to make it this year too. THANK YOU
