First online hacking conference: SecurityTubeCon

SecurityTubeCon is the first hacker conference to be held completely online, 6-8 November, 2009. The event is aimed at democratizing hacker conferences by allowing any researcher, regardless of his physical location, to share his work with the community.

The speaker approval process also differs a lot from that of other events. Unlike other cons, the organizers will not approve or reject speakers – if you have something interesting to share, you will be heard. The idea behind SecurityTubeCon is not to pass judgments on your work, instead, it aims at providing a platform for knowledge exchange.

When discussing this event format with Help Net Security, organizer Vivek Ramachandran commented: “I’ve always found it tough to travel to Hacker Cons around the world. So, I thought why not organize a conference which is entirely done online. This way researchers from all corners of the globe can participate either as speakers or as attendees.” Vivek is a security researcher that presented at both DEFCON and Toorcon.

The talk abstracts will naturally be made available online. Those interested in hearing a certain talk will be able to tune in to a screencast at a specified time. During and after the talks, participants will be able to ask questions to the presenters using IRC and chat rooms.

Those who decide to present will need to submit a video recording of their entire talk. This will ensure that participants have something to watch in case there is a last minute technical issue or some other problem. These videos will be made available absolutely free to everyone a week after the conference.

SecurityTubeCon will have four tracks:

• Research: Show your bleeding edge research and zero days here
• Tutorials: In-depth Tutorials on security technologies can be given here by domain experts
• Tool demos: Demonstration of new and cutting edge tools by their original authors
• Security product demos: Demos of state of the art security products by companies and organizations.

There’s a myriad of topics that can be presented at the event, some of them are:

• Protocol / application based vulnerability in networks and computers
• Firewall evasion techniques
• Intrusion detection/prevention
• Data recovery and incident response
• Mobile security (cellular technologies)
• Virus and worms
• WLAN and bluetooth security
• Analysis of malicious code
• Cryptography and cryptanalysis
• Computer forensics
• Cyber crime and law.

In order to apply for the event, read the details on the event website.