Thoroughly enjoyed my first PancakesCon. I look forward to next year.

@hacks4pancakes @pancakescon

So I participated on the @pancakescon CTF this year with a bunch of random people I met on the spot and… we ended up 2nd! Woah!!

For the good stuff: It was neat in general, I liked the Dr Seuss theming a lot, the infra setup was *really* decent (doesn't crash and burn on CTF beginning? Free Kali cloud instances to all teams?! Really sick!). Many of the easier challenges used fairly real-world concepts such as ICMP data exfiltration and Acropalypse abuse. I also liked that there were non-standard challenges like solving the Nim game by hand.

What swept me off my feet were the mainframe challenges they introduced in the middle of the CTF (edit: made by @mainframed767, kudos!) . Like… WOW! I feel like I just experienced the closest thing to "found an ancient alien computer in the middle of the desert, oh what it will contain". I have never touched a mainframe in my life, I had no idea what I was doing 99% of the time and I still managed to get 3 flags, including one nobody else got! It was very much frustrating but I had a blast with these challenges, now I really wanna pick up a mainframe emulator and play around with it.

In the end, I think being able to attract challenge creators who have the ideas, skill and know-how to bring such creative challenges makes for CTFs that people will find memorable and fun, even if they are not top-of-the-scene competitions. For that I gotta give massive kudos to Qualcomm and @hacks4pancakes. Also, kudos to the #pancakescon5 staff for being fairly active and responsive thorough the whole con.

For the stuff that could be improved: I felt some of the challenges were a bit guessy, and especially the web category overall was kinda broken in that sense; lots of 0-solves there. I think the CTF could have leaned more towards white-box challenges, I'd say black-box challenges tend to be a fairly frustrating, especially for beginners.

Another successful @pancakescon great special thank you to @hacks4pancakes for support and allowing me to be part of the AV team with amazing other folks who did a lot of heavy lifting.

. #community #education #Learning

Really enjoyed @pancakescon yesterday. To my surprise I learned the most from the non IT part. Some addresses feelings (directly and indirect) and how they handle them. Very relatable and inspiring.

Thanks @hacks4pancakes (and at least 20 others).

I was so busy yesterday learning that I forgot to promote! So!

Thank you so much to @pancakescon and @hacks4pancakes for being awesome! I learned a ton, including stuff I wasn’t expecting to, and I look forward to doing this again next year.

I had the pleasure of catching a few talks at @pancakescon on Sunday. This online event that is put together by @hacks4pancakes is simply amazing! I love the format of the talks and this is such a great free online yearly conference. All the Slack chat was awesome and the talks I saw were fantastic.

Thank you @pancakescon ! #pancakescon5 was a blast!

Congratulations to @pancakescon and all of the wonderful people that made it work. It's the most wholesome conference in our community.

@pancakescon @qualcomm Thanks for the CTF! It was fun! \o/

Thanks to everyone who crosspromoted and boosted @pancakescon today - it does not run without the community.

We had a GREAT group at the PancakesCon5 lockpick village today. I'd like to thank all the folks who participated, you were all amazing.
A shout out to the raffle winners of the patent posters, Mariah, Mike and Paul. We'll get those out to you ASAP.
And an ENORMOUS thank you to Lesley and team for their tireless work to put this on 5 years in a row!
@pancakescon

Whether you watched talks, networked, played the CTF, participated in villages, or were one of our awesome speakers or volunteers - thanks for being a part of our conference, today. Thanks again to our sponsors for supporting us. We hope everyone had a blast and learned something new. Until next year!

You can find the promised resources that coincide with my @pancakescon talk here. Go enjoy some Cats and please tell what you think it. Or go and doe some privacy threat modeling. I'm happy to discuss both!

https://github.com/0xD4ni/cats

CTF is almost done but still anyone's game! Well done, teams, and thanks again @qualcomm !

OK, what I'm learning from George Sandford's talk at @pancakescon is, once again, that kindness is punk as fuck. #PracticeKindess #PancakesCon

@DerpDerpington @nirik I mean, shouldn't there be???

@snowcrashmike so glad you are having fun

I had so much fun talking @pancakescon about container escapes and lump-free gravy! The event is free, fun, and I've loved learning so much! :heart_cyber:

My slides are here - https://some-natalie.dev/blog/containers-and-gravy/ with links to learn more

Recipes are there too, if you're hungry ;)

Thanks to HuskyHacks for the shout-out during @pancakescon! Here's the course to learn the defensive Python skills mentioned:

https://taggartinstitute.org/p/python-for-defenders-pt1