Happy new year! 🎉🥳🥂🥳✨
At the end of last year, cyllective helped to organize the "hackbar 202212" edition. As this yearly community-event is heavily inspired by the CCC, its main focus is on computer technology and cybersecurity.
For us, the main highlights were, next the to the live presentations by Natalie Kilber and Sophus Siegenthaler, the lockpicking-workshop by the Verein SPASS / lockpicking.ch and the lively discussions with prominent swiss security personalities and attendees. You can read all about it, underlined by the visual impressions, within this blogpost.
We planned the event in parallel to the annual Chaos Communication Congress, but unfortunately, the congress was canceled. Instead, the original organizers proclaimed a "Decentralized Year-End Event 22". Many hackerspaces and similar establishments all over Europe joined the call during that time (December 27th-30th, 2022). They opened their doors to offer interested/curious people insight into various topics. (#jev22) We then spontaneously joined this call for participation, which helped us in spreading the word about our event even further. At the event, we hacked together, listened to congress talks and ate delicious self-made meals. The lively exchange and the discussions among our attendees was what made the event even more worthwhile.
The discussions were accompanied by exciting lectures presented, exclusive to attendees of the hackbar and hackbar-associated events. These were both held live; although Natalie Kilber was scheduled to arrive in Bern, she had to speak remotely about post-quantum cryptography in her talk "Quantum Threat Inflation - riding the Cyber Wave". But her speech was streamed not only to the hackbar, but also shown at the hackerspace in Oslo simultaneously.
Sophus held two talks. One was titled "Cyber, Cyber, Cyber", which was on the state of cyber-things and presented selected cyber-curiosities of the last year, as well as a second talk titled "WordPress Plugin Security" #WPlague about the security research on WordPress Plugins, which cyllective concluded last year.
Many remote live lectures, held in the various hackerspaces, were presented on the cinema screen. Inbetween, we also watched the film "Alles ist Eins. Außer der 0." about the origin history of the CCC together.
On the third day, the highlight was the lockpicking workshop 🔐🔓, carried out by the fine folks of the SPASS (Schlösser Picken als Schweizer Sport) society.
They introduced us into the world of lockpicking, the different types of locks & facets of this sport, underlined with an explanation of the basic theory of lockpicking. Afterward, everybody interested had time to practice and apply this theory immediately and receive valuable tips and tricks from the club members. After some preparation, we went to the contest in the early evening, where we could apply what we had learned and challenge each other. The competition not only consisted of picking all kinds of different locks, but one of the disciplines also consisted of reassembling a lock correctly back together.
It was truly an honorable and great commitment of the SPASS / lockpicking.ch society members. <3
@GObugfree and @cyllective generously provided the contest prizes. 💚
Besides listening to the congress talks, hanging out and countless discussions, we also started to solve CTF (Capture-The-Flag) challenges together. The choice, where to participate, fell on securityvalley. Thanks to @aicdev for the cool CTF!
The participants at the hackbar 202212 came from different regions and all possible professional fields. The sticker exchange table made this evident, where some participants shared their stickers with everybody. An interim snapshot of the sticker exchange shows that there was something of almost everything present. Much to our pleasure, it was avery diversified audience.
We are enormously grateful for the lively participation of all attendees. <3
We also want to thank everyone who helped, especially the organizing crew, who took care of everything with enormous commitment in the days before, during, and after the event. We hope to see you all again soon and no later than at the next hackbar 202312. <3
All the best and happy hacking!
