ClubHack 2009: Day 1

Recently, I attended this Hacking and Security conference ClubHack. It was an awesome 3 day experience listening to seminars, workshops and round table conferences by various eminent speakers and hackers from all over the world. The speakers flocked in from various domains: Telecom, US DoD (Department of Defence), Royal Bank of Scotland, McAfee and even from Pune Police, NASSCOM, CID and other eminent law enforcement agencies! I reached the venue at 8:30 AM, leaving from my institute at 715 AM. The venue was 30 kilometres from my institute!!

What: ClubHack 2009, a meeting place for hackers, security professionals, law enforcement agencies, students and all other security enthusiasts.
Where: The Corinthians Club, Pune (The venue was awesome!)
When: Saturday 5th and Sunday 6th December, 2009

ClubHack 2009: Day 1
5th December, 2009 was Day 1 for ClubHack. The registrations started at around 10 AM (an hour late due to setting up of the venue). There were 3 halls, 2 for the simultaneous talks and the 3rd one for networking, meals and snacks. The day started with the introduction of ClubHack, by Rohit Srivastwa, the founder of ClubHack. This was followed by a small talk by the Chief Guest of the day, Mr. Alok Vijayant, Director Information Group, MHA, Govt. of India. After the keynote speech, the Indian version of BackTrack, Matriux, was launched. A copy of the same distribution was also distributed to all the audience.

Chief Guest at ClubHack 2009

Matriux Launch

After a small round of snacks and networking, the attendees split up in two halls, according to their interest in the talk. The schedule for the same was:

from	to	Room1	Room 2
1000	1100	Registration
1100	1200	Keynote & Matriux Launch by Mr. Alok Vijayant. Director Information Dominance Group, MHA, Govt of India
1200	1300	Rohas Nagpal – Indian IT Act 2000 vs 2009	Manindra Kishore – Incident Handling and Log Analysis for Web Based Incidents
1300	1400	Anant Kochar – Revealing the Secrets: Source Code Disclosure, Techniques and Impacts	Abhijit Tannu – Facilitate Collaboration with Information Rights Management
1400	1530	Lunch
1530	1630	Nikhil Wagholikar in abstentia of K K Mookhey – Risk Based Penetration Testing	Suhas Desai – Open source for securing data with advanced Crypto-Steganography technology
1630	1730	Vinoo Thomas & Rahul Mohandas – India Cyber Crime Scene – Caught in the Crossfire	Lavakumar Kuppan - Lust 2.0 – Desire for free WiFi and the threat of the Imposter
1730	1830	Kush Wadhwa – Advance Computer Forensic concepts (windows)	Gursev Singh Kalra – Mobile Application Security Testing

Another superb thing was the “Internet Bakra”. Running sslstrip and dsniff on the free internet which was provided for the day, all the passwords were sniffed and later at the end of the talks, were shown to people (just the 1st two characters of the password) to explain them that entering personal information in free connections can be harmful. While this did

After all the talks, ClubHack threw a party (on invitation) for the speakers, the volunteers and a few attendees. The party was in Dolally, the only microbrewery in Pune. Dolally is an awesome place (for people who drink beer). It has a wide variety of beers which they brew in house. They also showed us how beer was brewed from around 10 different wheat types. It takes around 20 days to brew beer!! It also has a DJ which plays on-demand music for free!! It was fun discussing informal things with the people whom you saw in formals the whole day! At one particular incident, I couldn’t recognize Mr. Nikhil Wagholikar (from NII Consulting) in the party. He was totally in formals in the day time, and in the evening, total informals!! Dinner was in the same hotel, having a buffet with all the speakers, the volunteers and other guests.

ClubHack Day 1 Party at Doolally

The day ended at around 11 PM (for me, since had to reach my institute before the gates closed for us!!).

The Volunteering Team

• Pankit Thakkar
• Abhijeet Patil
• Murtuja Bharmal
• Aseem Jakhar (founder www.null.co.in)
• Tushar Dalvi
• Pradnya
• Antariksh Shah
• Prashant Mahajan
• Anish
• Ajit Hatti
• and a few more … Kudos to them for a successful Day 1 (and simultaneously, Day 2 and 3!!)

Finally, saying goodbye to everyone, we left for our college at around 11:30 PM (the gate closing ceremony of Symbiosis Infotech Campus, Hinjewadi takes place at 11:30 PM!! we were late!!). Thanks a lot to Mr. Dinesh O’Bareja for giving us a lift till Wakad. We finally reached the campus at around 12:30 AM, went to sleep, just to wake up in another 4 hours for the fully informative, knowledge filled next day of ClubHack: the workshops.

ClubHack 2009!

ClubHack 2009

ClubHack is back! India’s own International Hacker’s Convention is back with its 3rd version with the aim to enable the dissemination, discussion and sharing of deep knowledge in the field of information security and cyber crime investigation.

What: ClubHack 2009, a meeting place for hackers, security professionals, law enforcement agencies, students and all other security enthusiats.
When: Saturday 5th and Sunday 6th December, 2009
Where: ICC or Estique
Registration: Opens in October, 2009. http://clubhack.com/2009/Registration

Rohit Srivastwa

Founder: Rohit Srivastwa
Rohit Srivastwa is a well known security evangelist. He has an expertise in cyber crime investigation and IT infrastructure management. Rohit is actively involved advising several military agencies, law enforcement personnel, media, corporate and Government bodies in these fields. Along with assisting these organizations solving there cases, Rohit is also involved in teaching the related subjects to them. Rohit has trained the police departments of Pune, Mauritius and Malaysia. Rohit Srivastwa is also the founder of ClubHack, a member driven community to spread the security awareness. As his last assignment Rohit was Director Technology at Commonwealth Games Pune (2008) where he delivered the complete technology of games and managed everything which comes under the umbrella of technology.
Currently he is Director Technology and Network Operations for Commonwealth Games to be held in Delhi in year 2010.

ClubHack, India’s Own Hacker’s Convention enters its 3rd version on the 5th and 6th of December, 2009. Previously, it was held successfully in December 2007 and 2008.

ClubHack 2009: Call for Papers
SUBMISSION: ClubHack2009 is expecting a good deep knowledge technical presentations/demonstrations on topics from the world of Information Security. These presentations are expected to be of 40 minutes each. The schedule time for each presenter would be 50 minutes out of which 40 minutes are for the presentation & 10 for the question-answer sessions. We’d request you to submit the papers keeping the time constraint in mind.

TOPICS: The following list is made keeping in mind the most interesting topics in hacking & security. This is more of an indicative list, the papers submission can be on other topics also but have to be close to this & the theme of the event.

• Protocol / Application based vulnerability in networks and computers
• Firewall Evasion techniques
• Intrusion detection/prevention
• SPAM fighting
• 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
• File system security
• Secure coding & code analysis
• Hardware modification
• Patch writing for vulnerabilities
• Open source hacking toolkit
• Cyber Crime & law

Dates:
Opening: 15th August 2009
Closing: 15th October 2009

For more information, check out http://www.clubhack.com/2009

Me in ClubHack Workshop

ClubHack session in progress

ClubHack

It was 8:30 in the morning of 7th day of December when I, as usual, woke up and went down to the mess for my breakfast. After picking up my plate and taking bread-butter-tea, I reached the table where my class mates were sitting. It was a normal day for all! Then came up Utkarsh’s question, “We have a workshop on hacking, are you interested to join me?” I could not believe what he just said, and so I asked him to repeat what he said … “Are you interested to attend a hacking workshop with me?” “Of course I am! I am all ready for it, just tell me the time and the place.” … “Be ready by 11am, we will leave by the 11:15 bus” … “sure! “.

While going back to my room, I just pondered over the thing I have always wanted. I wanted a group, a group with whom I could learn new things (related to hacking and security, of course). A group with whom I could sit all day and night sitting in front of the laptop and doing “geeky” stuff, with whom I could share all my hacks and “cracks”. Well, seems here is a start for me.

(hey ClubHack people, dont read this part):
On the way to the destination, I was told that we are going in for free, thanks to one volunteer, Amit Tripathi, my senior. I attended around 4 lectures that day (where each cost Rs. 1000!), whereas Utkarsh seemed to be bored of just one. Believe me, it was great to attend the workshop, it was ultimate to be around those superb people of whom I had only dreamt! The same day, I met Mr. Rohit Srivastwa. Asked him how to join ClubHack. I was surprised to hear the reply, “… there is no “membership” here. Its just like a friend circle, without any boundary. If you want to join a security and hacking community, theres Null, a Network Security group …”. He introduced me to Mr. Aseem Jakhar, the founder of Null. I decided to attend the Null meet the next day, after listening to him.

The workshop spanned 2 days, first day was for theoretical knowledge, the 2nd for practical things. After reaching home the first night, I called up my dad to get Rs. 1000 for the next day (of course you cant expect them to allow me free entry 2 days!!) Getting dad’s green signal (thanks a lot ) I went into the workshop the next day full excited (well, I did skip my breakfast that day). Got my registration done, got a T Shirt, and went into the first practical seminar. This was followed by the Null meet. There were quite a few people, around 10.

After that workshop, I attended a lot many workshops by different groups, OpenSocial Developer Garage, Null Event (i was a volunteer) …. etc, etc, etc.

In short, these two days have been the best of my life. I got to know a lot many people here, Vipul Kalia, Tushar Dalvi, Tara, Aseem, Murtuja, Rohit, Ajit, Priyank, Vishal…. many, many … and got to know about many groups of Pune too, PLUG, POCC, etc, etc, etc. This “friend group” without a boundary seems to be a superb one. Everyone seems to be getting along with each other pretty well! (Except for Vishal, he robbed me of my Google Cap!!! I will kill you, Vishal)

Thanks a lot Utkarsh …

Long time no see!!

Its more than 6 months that I haven’t written in this blog of mine. Seems this is the right time to start blogging. Having got into contact with various groups of Pune, like ClubHack, Null, POCC, PLUG, and loads more, it seems i do have some work at last. And yes, this time I am pakka that I would keep on posting stuff here.

Cheers