Indian hackers have reached DEFCON to showcase their skills at the biggest hackathon event in las vegas
The biggest hacking event included visitors from South Korea, China, India, Taiwan, Japan, as participants, who were primarily young men and women. Others were college students, while some worked for their respective governments, commercial businesses, or both. The DEFCON CTF competition enables top hackers to interact while their nations may be conducting cyber espionage against one another.
The “Olympics of hacking” “Capture the Flag” competition, which brings together some of the greatest in the world, was won by a team of hackers from two North American institutions.
The few dozen hackers competing in the challenge sat slumped over laptops from Friday through Sunday during the DEFCON security conference that hosts the event in the carpeted ballroom of one of the biggest casinos in Las Vegas. Participants from Carnegie Mellon University, its alums, and the University of British Columbia made up the winning team, Maple Mallard Magistrates.
The challenge entails breaking into specially created software created by the tournament directors. Participants must protect themselves from other competitors’ hacks in addition to finding faults in the application.
Instead of money, prestige is the prize. Giovanni Vigna, a competitor and professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, claimed that “no other competition has the clout of this one.” And everyone stays out of politics. You may readily spot a participant in this group telling someone who may be from a so-called enemy country that they did a fantastic hack.
The game has acquired additional significance in recent years as the United States, its allies, and rivals have raised cybersecurity to the level of a national security concern. As hacking technology advanced over the past ten years, the cybersecurity industry’s value exploded.
A contestant who works as an engineer for electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Inc., Aaditya Purani, remarked that winning the competition is a lifetime achievement.
This year’s competition was streamed live on YouTube for the first time along with sports-style live commentary. According to event staff, DEFCON itself, which started as a rendezvous of a few hundred hackers in the late 1990s, was arranged over four casinos this year and attracted an audience of more than 30,000.
