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March 17, 2019

BSides Canberra 2019 Conference Wrap-Up

by | Conferences

BSides Canberra 2019 is over but it was amazing and I did a lot of things this year.

In the Locksport Village I did a bit of lock picking to start with.

But this year I learned how to crack open a safe! With the small electronic safes, you can bounce them to disengage the pins. It’s all about wiggling the lock and bouncing the safe at the same time to pop the lock open as the pins bounce back and you can open the safe.

Also at BSides Canberra I saw lots of my friends, like Liam, Topaz, Jo, Chris, Klepas, Mel, James, and lots more. I also made a few new friends like Tim, Echo and a few others!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Tim taught me how to solder my badge together but a few of my headers broke which was sad ☹️ but that’s ok, because I soldered more headers on ????

Soldering headers to the BSides Canberra 2019 badge with help from Tim

In the process of soldering, I got a 400 degree burn on my finger which was not nice at all. It got all swollen but today it feels better ????.

Blisters on finger from soldering iron burn

Tim my new friend gave me this awesome electronic Tic-Tac-Toe add-on to my badge which Josh Johnson made that is so cool. On the Tic-Tac-Toe add-on it said “Greetings Professor Falken”. I still don’t get it but that’s ok. Dad just told me it’s from an old movie I need to watch.

An electronic toc-tac-toe add-on board to the bsides canberra 2019 badge

At the conference I stole my mum’s hacker chix badge so I could solder it and I did but by the time me and my dad finished it we realised we put the LEDs back to front. We plan to fix it at home. You can see how tiny the LED is next to my finger!

Hacker Chix badge showing tiny surface mount LED next to finger for reference

At the end of the first day of BSides Canberra, the man at the cafe gave me a free piece of cake to eat and it was so good ????.

Piece of chocolate cake on a white plate

BSides Canberra 2019 was so much fun and it was great to see my friends and to learn some new things.

– Mos

On Thursday we drove to are first conference of the year, BSides Canberra! When we registered we got our awesome new badges that looked like old Nokia phones. We could even play Snake and Tetris on them!

Nopia 1337 BSides Canberra Badge

After we got our badges we went to find Liam who always sits with us at the keynote.

We then saw a really cool keynote by Elanor Huntington about quantum computing. I thought it was pretty cool how she was the first female dean of engineering and computer science at the ANU and still one of few in the world.
After that we went to hang out at the Locksport village for a while we picked a few locks ???? with all different amounts of pins like 2 ,3 ,4 ,5, 6.

We also went to the hardware hacking village so we could hack our main badge and also build our hacker chix badges.

Soldering headers on the BSides Canberra 2019 badge

The girls at the conference got extra badges that plugged into to the main badge but we had to build them. We added little lights (LEDs) with the soldering iron and it looked awesome.

soldering resistors on the hacker chix badge
Finished hacker chix badge with LEDs glowing

I then went to the tamper evident bypassing table and saw some people that looked like they needed some help so I went over to help, and for the rest of the afternoon I met some really nice friends and helped out a lot. I taught them how to bypass security envelopes, security labels, wristbands and how to shim.

Then after the first day of the conference we went out for dinner with my Dad’s team and a few others, so there was James, Jo , Chris , Topaz , Uncle Dave, Igor, Mel, Mum, me and Mos. It was really enjoyable. I sat next to Jo and James at the head of the table and had pasta covered in cheese then we went back to our hotel and everyone else went to the Friday night after party.

The next day….. it was the last day of the conference so we woke up bright and early to see the next keynote about jailbreaking and hacking the iPhone by Mark Dowd. Mark is an old friend of Mum and Dad’s and is currently the director of Azimuth Security that does security code review and cutting edge security research. It was really interesting.

We then went out for lunch to a burger place right next to the conference but then sadly it was time to go home. Can’t wait to see our hacker fam again at OzSecCon 2019 in Melbourne!!!

– Boo

Mos

Mos

Mos aka MrOldSkinny, loves to hack things together whether it be hardware, software or a combination of both! When he isn’t doing crazy hacks you will find him picking locks, tampering with tamper-proof devices, and finding weaknesses in security controls. All the cybers will be his!

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