Positive Hack Days (PHDays) is an annual international cybersecurity forum. It has been held by Positive Technologies since 2011. PHDays brings together IT and infosec experts, government officials, business representatives, students, and schoolchildren. The forum hosts talks and workshops on the most interesting information security topics, The Standoff cyberexercises, practical competitions in which participants analyze the security of industrial control systems, banking and mobile services, and web apps.
PHDays scope and agenda can be compared to those of Black Hat, DEF CON, and Source. The forum addresses the security of government and individuals in today's cyberworld, zero-day attacks and digital investigations, cyberwarfare, and cryptography.
The forum takes place in Moscow in May. An attendance fee is required. Free tickets are available for winners of special white hacking contests and for students who participate in the Positive Education program. Presentations are given in Russian and English.
PHDays 2011: Who Wins
The first forum was held on May 19, 2011, at a popular club in Moscow.
Talks and workshops covered such topics as government control of information security in Russia, remote banking system safety, secure connection in VoIP, protection of data in the cloud, and security of virtualization systems. The key guest speaker of the event was Dmitry Sklyarov.
During the forum, a capture the flag (CTF) competition was held among information security specialists from different countries. The US team PPP was the winner. There were other hacking contests, and during one of them a participant detected a zero-day vulnerability in Safari for Windows.
Among other speakers were experts from Kaspersky Lab, Russian Agricultural Bank, VimpelCom, Rostelecom, Cisco Systems, Leta IT-Company, Positive Technologies, and PwC. About 500 people attended the one-day event.
PHDays 2012: Future Now
The second forum was conducted on May 30 and 31, 2012 at Digital October's center of new technologies. Along with six parallel streams of presentations and workshops, a CTF competition and several security-related contests were held again. Topics were divided into two areas: technical (exploiting radio noise, password protection, telecom security, usage of sqlmap) and business (internet banking security, data leakage in government, seeking specialists in information security).
The conference featured Bruce Schneier, an American cryptographer and the author of Applied Cryptography, Datuk Mohd Noor Amin (from IMPACT, UN), and the creator of the password cracking tool John the Ripper Alexander Peslyak (known as Solar Designer).
Significant events included: demonstration of zero-day vulnerabilities in Windows XP and FreeBSD 8.3, cracking iPhone 4S using the popular application Office Plus, and contests in taking control of AR.Drone and analyzing remote banking system security.
Young School, a competition of young scientists' research papers, took place for the first time. PHDays 2012 was attended by 2,000 people.
PHDays III: From Both Sides of the Barricade
The third conference was held on May 23 and 24 at the Moscow World Trade Center. The main topics were ICS protection, web application and mobile application security, and preventing attacks against banking systems, as well as cooperation between government, researchers and information society. The lead speaker of the third forum was Marc "van Hauser" Heuse, the creator of THC-Hydra, Amap, and SuSEfirewall and the founder of The Hacker Choice.
Significant events included a talk from SCADA Strangelove about the security of Siemens SIMATIC software, a workshop on ATM hacking, and a workshop from TOOOL (experts in nondestructive lock opening). The forum featured a model railroad controlled by real industrial systems, the security of which was to be tested by the participants, and the Labyrinth's rooms, with laser field and motion detectors (10).
A famous hacker George Hotz (geohot) participated in the CTF contest as a member of PPP. He was the first to unlock the iPhone to use it with other providers besides AT&T. George Hotz also won 2drunk2hack, a contest where participants hack web applications and must finish an alcoholic beverage when they fail.
Anatoly Katyushin, a student from Samara nicknamed "heartless," won a $natch contest in which participants tested the security of remote banking systems: he hacked a remote banking system and stole 4,900 rubles.
The Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky took part in a discussion about encouraging information security specialists to work within legal boundaries.
Over 2,000 people visited the event.