The international practical cybersecurity conference OFFZONE 2018 was hosted last November 15-16, by BI.ZONE at Digital October venue, where it gathered more than 900 people from across 14 nations.

The event included two main report tracks: Main Track and Fast Track – where participants covered the latest developments in cybersecurity, as well as three theme zones: security gurus from the largest financial institutions shared their knowledge at the FINANCE.ZONE, experts of application security analysis presented their findings at the WEB.ZONE, gritty researchers gave us a deeper look into the equipment and manual side of computers at the HARDWARE.ZONE.

In the 2 days the visitors heard reports from 52 experts from Russia, Europe and Asia, some of whom came to represent such IT companies as ESET, Symantec and Positive Technologies. BI.ZONE had also made an expert contribution presenting several reports on the prospects of biometric technologies, financial service security, hardware attack threats.  

The conference guests were welcome to test their skills in a range of technical competitions and unique quests, set to a ‘post-apocalyptic’ scene from the future. OFFZONE 2018 partners deserving of credit for adding to the realism of this concept include: Kaspersky Labs, Qiwi, Wallarm.

The main event at the conference was the annual ethical hacking championship CTFZONE 2018. This tournament was held by BI.ZONE for the third time, and since its inception in 2016, more than 2000 teams from around the world have taken the challenge.  merged with the conference. In 2018 the playoffs were held between 1000 teams from 50 nations, but only 10 best teams from Russia, Hungary, Poland, South Korea, Ukraine and China made it to the final round. The intense Attack/Defence cyber-battle helped identify the 3 strongest teams to share the $18 000 prize fund.