MANILA, PHILIPPINES — World-renowned hacker and National Geographic’s “Breakthrough” series personality, Jayson Street is headlining ROOTCON 11, an annual hacker conference participated in by local and international hackers, and the country’s biggest local and global technology companies.
“We are excited to have Jayson Street as one of our resource speakers for Rootcon 11. Jayson is a well-respected member of the international hacking community and is considered a hero among local hackers, said Dax Labrador, ROOTCON founder and professional hacker. “His work throughout his brilliant career, which you can see examples of in his National Geographic episodes on cybersecurity, has brought the issues of cybersecurity and cyber-terrorism to the mainstream.”
On top of his work with National Geographic, Street is also as a hacker for hire and founder of a company that works with various enterprises to find their network vulnerabilities, as well as the author of Dissecting the Hack: The F0rb1dd3n Network, a fictional tale that has been described as “one part thriller and one part technical manual”. The book takes its readers through a hacker’s mind and his methods including how he performs reconnaissance, how an attacker looks for network weaknesses and how he exploits these vulnerabilities, his different attack tactics, and how an attacker erases information and hide his presence on a computer system. The book also offers it readers a glimpse into the secretive world of hackers and an insight into the hacking culture.
“Jayson has been a tremendous influence for Filipino hackers and we consider his book as one of the best works that highlight hacking culture and the work that we do as hackers,” Labrador shared. “In the last two years, more people have been made aware of hacking because of news reports on the Comelec leaks, banking security breaches, and incidents of identity theft of personal users that compromised their financial or personal information.”
While he is pleased that the public are more aware and vigilant against potential threats by malicious hackers, he said that there is still a need to inform the public of the work of “white hat hackers” and how they are different from their malicious counterparts.
“There is still that perception that all “hackers” are bad. That we steal information or destroy systems. My challenge as founder of ROOTCON is to change this perception and show people and even institutions that we are an integral part of the information security landscape. In fact, a great majority of us work in private corporations as part of their cybersecurity team. Those that have their private practice or work freelance, like Jayson, are hired by private companies and greatly valued by them for their expertise and their ability to prevent and even thwart cybersecurity threats,” Labrador said.
This year, ROOTCON 11 will be held at the Taal Vista Hotel in Tagaytay from September 21 to 22. Apart from Jayson Street, Rootcon 11 will also feature Arthur Garipov, an expert on security research of wireless technologies, mobile systems, and IoT (Internet of Things); Christopher Elisan, a seasoned reverse engineer and malware researcher and principal malware scientist at security company, RSA; security researcher, Daniel Frank; Jason Haddix, Head of Trust and Security at Bugcrowd; Keith Lee, whose work as senior security consultant sees him providing penetration testing, social engineering and incident response services to clients in the Asia-Pacific region; Lucas Apa, an information security expert focused on offensive security; Timur Yunusov, senior expert of banking systems security and author of multiple researches in field of application security; malware analyst; penetration tester and malware analyst, Michael Rebultan,; Singi & Reum, mentor of Korea’s next generation security leader education program, “Best of the Best”; Vladimir Katalov, CEO, co-owner and co-founder of ElcomSoft Co.Ltd and an expert on IT security and computer forensics; Wilson Chua, big data analytics expert and the man who predicted President Duterte’s victory in the last Philippine presidential elections based on twitter sentiment analysis, and; Yury Chemerkin, multi-skilled security expert on security & compliance, focused on privacy and leakage showdown.
“We’re happy to have a diverse group of speakers for this year’s conference and the support of local and multinational technology companies, as well as our colleagues from other information security organizations,” Labrador said. “The hacker community across the country is, of course, coming out in full force along with students and enthusiasts who would like to know more about hacking and meet the luminaries of the local and international hacker community and participate in the fun hacking exercises that we’ve lined up for participants.”
