News

For the last two years your ticket has granted you access to a day full of amazing talks, a lunch including ice cream from one of the best producers in the country, a true northern dinner and enough free drinks at the party to make everyone merry, but this year we are going a step further, we are adding workshops!

We are going to make Friday afternoon Workshop Time. At the moment, the plan is to run between four and five sessions between 1PM and 5PM but depending on numbers this might open up to the morning as well.

So as well, as looking for CFP submissions for talks, we also want workshop submissions. We want either two or four hour sessions and are looking for anything hacker related. We are expecting the usual “this is how to hack product X” but, in line with our range of talks, would also like some on soft skills and other none technical topics. These all have to be carried out in university provided rooms so please consider this when coming up with ideas, if you are not sure if something is appropriate then please get in touch and we will make a decision.

Once we have the schedule sorted out we will open ticketing to let you book your seats and, as said before, this is all in the one ticket, this is not an extra cost, just reserving seats for bums.

After a lot of hard work by Luke, Cal and Tom we’ve finally got the videos sorted and uploaded. Not all the talks were recorded and not all the recordings have made it through to being published, this is because, despite all the work put in on the day and in post production, the quality is no where near what we would have liked due to a number of problems including:

• Cameras failing
• Memory cards filling up
• Microphones not picking up what they were supposed to
• Picture in picture accidentally being turned on during recording losing a chunk of screen space
• Poor lighting in track 2
• Various other little niggles

We’ve learnt a lot from this and plans are already in place for next year where we hope to be able to do live streaming, this should mean problems are picked up straight away and the recordings are ready for release within days not months.

Apologies to the speakers whose hard work didn’t make it through, if you want to see what we have we can send you what we have of your talk, just get in touch.

We are pleased to add HSBC to our list of supporters:

Chris Ratcliff created this ICS file for us for to help you organise your day.

SteelCon 2015 Calendar

Since I moved house I’ve had a pile of tech books stacked under my desk that I know I’ll never read but don’t want to give to the local charity shop as I doubt they’d sell. So I was thinking, I might just bring them along to the con, put them on a table and if anyone wants one they can put some cash in a charity donation bucket. I’m sure there will be someone from a hackerspace there at the end who be happy to take any left overs away and if not then I’ve tried and Oxfam can have them.

If anyone else wants to bring along any that they don’t want then feel free, better given to a good home than collecting dust and taking up space.

To keep the fun going into the evening, Jess Barker has volunteered to put together an infosec quiz for us which we are going to mix in with some rounds of PowerPoint karaoke MC’d by Freaky Clown. For those unfamiliar with PowerPoint karaoke, we pull a selection of slide decks from the internet and each presenter is given a random one to present on sight, how they do it and in what style is up to them.

All this topped off with a good helping of Northern cuisine and a nice large bar tab courtesy of Nettitude  should make it an evening to remember.

PS for those brave enough, the SteelCon shots will be making a return. For those who weren’t involved last year you’ll have to wait for the night to find out our secret ingredient.

Last Thursday I was very happy to announce that we sold out of all 200 Hacker tickets that were available online. Since then I’ve had quite a lot of emails from people who left it a little late and are now stuck without a ticket.

The reason we capped the tickets at 200 was to allow us to budget for food, goody bags etc and to get things ordered, however the actual venue capacity is quite a lot higher than this. So, what I’ve decided to do is to release another 50 tickets however these will not get you goody bags on the door, the cash is needed to cover other things that weren’t in the original budget numbers. If there is spare cash then I’ll try to put together a minimal bag and last year there were quite a few bags left over from no-shows so these will be given out towards the end of the day so you may still get something.

I’ll be releasing the tickets initially to those on the waiting list then at 9AM tomorrow morning they will open to general sales.

We still have more to come but here is the current list of confirmed speakers:

Opening Keynote

Campbell Murray – Getting started in SCADA testing

Closing Keynote

Freaky Clown and Jessica Barker – Get Hacked

Talks

Chris Ratcliff – Hacking Meatware

Finux – Wrong Side of History

Mo Amin – Popping the Bubble

Darren Martyn – 0wning the Internet of Trash: A gentle intro to IoT Ownage

Alastair – The Matrix LD_PRELOADED

David Day – HAL can read malwares lips

Dave Hardy and Ben Turner – PowerShell Fu with Metasploit  “Interactive PowerShell Sessions in Metasploit”

Grigorios Fragkos – Can you really hack an airplane? (myths & truths)

xtr4nge – Attacking the user to compromise corporate networks with FruityWifi

Tom Keetch – Reverse Engineering Android Applications

Workshop

Finux – Docker for security researchers and pen testers (2.5 hours)

As people have been asking how the weekend is going to work I thought I’d put up a rough schedule. This is based on last year and could change but hopefully not to much.

Friday night is social night, a simple get together in a local pub for a few drinks. Kicking off around 18:30-19:00 but feel free to turn up whenever you get in. We will be picking a pub with food so we can settle in for the evening.

Saturday is the main event. Doors open around 9:00 with the welcome talk at 9:45 and keynote at 10:00. Lunch, which is provided, is between 13:00 and 14:00 and the last talk will be finishing around 18:30, or maybe a bit later if last year is anything to go by. The after party will be opening as soon as the talks have finished and will be going till 2:00 for anyone who can stay the distance. We have a nice large bar tab, thanks Nettitude, and food, with a Northern twist, will again be provided.

Sunday morning gives you the chance to work off your hangover with a game or two of Laser Quest thanks to Xiphos. This went really well last year and was a lot of fun. After this we will probably repeat last year and get together somewhere for lunch, everyone welcome even if you didn’t come to the shoot ’em up.

A more solid schedule will be posted closer to the date.