Our First Ethical Hacker Brighton Meetup

Ethical hacker meetup

Last Updated on 8 June 2023 by admin

Last Thursday saw the launch of our ethical hackers’ meetup, HackerLab. Held just down the road from our offices in Brighton, the event attracted a great mix of learners and seasoned professionals. All coming to share ideas, get involved in hacking, and sink a couple of beers.

One of the benefits of being based in Brighton is its booming tech scene. Some truly amazing businesses call the city home and are all pushing the boundaries of innovation.

With such a wealth of talent, we felt that HackerLab would be an ideal opportunity for hackers to:

  • Get together and make new connections
  • Share best practice
  • Crack some of the fiendish challenges our testers meticulously reconstructed on our labs

We ensure HackerLab is as inclusive as possible. To do this, we created a range of challenges that everyone could get involved with and test their hacking skills – no matter their experience.

The challenges set for our ethical hackers

On the night we had four labs running;

  1. Practice OWASP BWA and Metaploitable 1,2,3 etc
  2. Easy Ten machines included a relatively simple MS17-010 vulnerability and several other points and click exploits
  3. Medium Eight machines, a bit trickier allowing people to use brute-forcing, exploiting web applications, SQLi, and uploading reverse shells
  4. Hard Five Machines – and a few which were hidden – presented a tough challenge with buffer overflows, reverse engineering, and binary exploitation

The hackers set to work on tackling all the challenges and it was fantastic to see so much collaboration and coaching on the techniques used by everyone involved.

We would like to say a big thank you to everyone who came along and to the Alcampo Lounge for hosting us.

Get involved

If you are interested in the following HackerLab is the event for you:

  • Bug bounties
  • Capture the flag
  • Ethical hacking
  • Programming
  • Wifi hacking