Tips For Awesome Infosec Conferences
Security researcher Abartan Dhakal just returned from his first infosec CON's, here are his top tips for getting the best out of your conference trips.
Hello everyone, I have returned from my travels to write for our very own awesome Secjuice. I was doing a bit of traveling around different timezones and attending some awesome conferences. Thanks to my employer, I managed to visit my first ever international infosec conference and then a week after returning back to Sydney, I went to another infosec conference, the second conference ever in my life!
During my travel, I managed to meet a lot of awesome people who were starters like me, some were industry leaders and most were hackers with tons of experience and some awesome skill sets. I present to you my tips that will surely make your solo time traveling around different conferences awesome and that I wish I had followed myself! I will from now on though! I thank everyone out there that I met in those conferences who helped me understand things and in their honor, I have come up with these tips to help others going to conferences for the first time.
Tip Number 1 - Get Swag
If you are traveling solo just like I was to infosec conferences, make sure to go-to different booths and grab those swag packs! I know this is less like a good tip but if you didn't get some swag packs, you will regret when you want something to look back at the conference and reminisce about, swag is nostalgic and collectable.
Tip Number 2 - Make Friends
Make sure you meet people and network. I love to meet new people but at the same time, I have a really bad time introducing myself to new people. This is something I am working on to improve myself, but I fight it and you never know when that friend you made in the con, might teach you some good lessons in life. I recently read a tweet by someone who had made new friends in a conference and they wanted to get started into infosec and now one of them is working as his colleague in the same company. So you never know what you might learn from others, make new friends!!!
Tip Number 3 - Don't Use Your Laptop
Keep your laptops shut or leave it at home. You use that same everyday for different things, don't start using it when you can have fun with old/new friends at the cons. I usually don't even take part in CTFs or any activities where you need to use a laptop because I use it everyday for pentests and I wanna have some time off to have fun with people, not machines. I understand that laptops are really important part of our lives as hackers but cons are really good place to unplug yourself for once.
The Lesson I Learned
I learned that attending the cons, making new friends, networking and learning together really helps you strengthen your own mental health and well being. We all know that along with physical health, mental health is something we really need to take care of as well, it is easy to forget about because we all work remotely. These cons made me fresh and ready to work on now things and they gave me the curiosity and motivation to learn more about hardware and network related hacks as a bonus!
Thats it for the time being folks! I will come up with something new again soon! If you wanna read anything specific related to bugbounties or penetration testing, you can always reach out to me via twitter and suggest that I write something!
