BSidesLV, Black Hat and DEF CON week is “that time of year” in the security industry; when hackers, suits, feds and anyone else interested in our craft descend on Las Vegas. The goal? To teach, demonstrate, learn, connect, and enjoy the company of fellow members of the village.

Since the beginning, hackers have long sought out the cooperation of those they want to help. This year, it felt like we took a giant leap forward in building that relationship between those who have traditionally been distrusted by the internet, and those who rely on them.

The week kicked off with a must-watch keynote from Alex Stamos, CSO of Facebook, on the progress of this relationship and the things we should think about going forward, and Kevin Roose of NYT summed up the week brilliantly with his piece “What if the problem we face is not too many bad hackers, but too few good ones?”. All-in-all, my Hacker Summer Camp takeaway was that hackers and those needing their help are finally agreed on the need to get along…

The question is, how? This question is why Bugcrowd exists – Working with hackers that use their skills to make the internet a safer place, and connecting them to the organizations that need their help. Suffice to say, we had a pretty busy and incredibly amazing week at Hacker Summer Camp:

  • Over 7 days, we hosted 11 events in Las Vegas, up from 9 last year, including the RiskyBiz Party, Zerofox Level Up Black Hat Party, RockHouse ‘House’ Party, and the famous, QueerCon Pool Party.
  • Our DEF CON hospitality suite turned into a series of house parties with none other than the grand-daddy of Nerdcore, Dualcore.
  • We gave a total of 5 talks across all three conferences. Our Head of Trust and Security, Jason Haddix teamed up with our Trust and Security engineer, JP Villanueva to debut THE HUNT methodology and our VP of Product, Jonathan Cran discussed attack surface discovery at Recon Village.
  • We gave away an unprecedented 50K pieces of swag, including our “Grace Hopper has a posse” t-shirts, stickers, posters, water bottles, USB condoms, beach balls and rainbow unicorns.  
  • With the Car Hacking Village, we hosted a Capture the Flag (CTF) event at DEF CON, and gave away a pick-up truck and black badge!

For those of you who couldn’t make it to the conferences this year or had a little too much Vegas fun, here’s a short recap:

BSidesLV

It was great kicking off the week with BSidesLV, which is getting bigger and better! We had great conversations with the security researcher community and those interested in working with the security researcher community. Not to mention we debuted our new shirt design and collateral for the week.

Black Hat

This year’s Black Hat event was quite the milestone for Bugcrowd. We had our first-ever Black Hat booth, which featured our new design and product video. We had a few of our top security researchers at the booth, engaging with customers, prospects and partners.

Jason Haddix and JP Villanueva held several talks across both Black Hat and DEFCON around the HUNT methodology, examining data-driven web hacking and manual testing. If you missed these talks, dont worry! JP will be doing another talk on the HUNT at AppSec USA 2017

Our VP of Product, Jonathan Cran presented at the DEFCON Recon Village and demoed our integration with Qualys at the Qualys booth. 

We also saw great success with our RiskyBiz, LevelUp and House Parties. Over the three events and Black Hat show floor, we had the pleasure of hanging out with more than 10K attendees. Rock on!

 

DEF CON

We were excited to be working with the Car Hacking Village again this year, hosting and running the Capture the Flag (CTF) event. Our lucky winner, Javier Vazquez Vidal (@fjvva) took home a brand new pick-up truck!

Our hospitality suite at Caesars provided show-goers a place to unwind, recharge, and mingle. It was great to grab a drink and chat with customers, researchers and colleagues after a long conference.

We had a phenomenal week in Vegas hanging with customers, partners and security researchers! After 11 events, we’re all a little exhausted, but feeling excited about the community we’ve built. Thanks to everyone who made it possible! We’re already looking forward to next year’s events. #ItTakesACrowd