AppSecEu Conference Review

AppSecEU in Belfast started with a bang. The organising committee sponsored 500 school children from all over Northern Ireland to take part in Security awareness talks and demonstrations. It was great to see the level of engagement from the school children.

Also starting on Monday was the AppSecEu training. This included training from a number of world renowned security researchers and covered topics ranging from advanced exploitation techniques to Breaking Single Sign-On. Feedback from the students was extremely positive and is something we will be hoping to build on for future AppSec conferences.

Monday evening in combination with the Women who Code Belfast group, the OWASP Women in

AppSec team invited those interested in mentoring or being mentored to the Waterfront venue for an evening of invigorating talks and fun.  This is the second time the WiA mentoring event has been held and participation was double that of the previous event in Washington D.C.

Wednesday evening saw a pre-conference drinks reception taking place where local business were invited to come speak to vendors and listen to local security and entrepreneurs speaking about their experiences. The OWASP leader meeting also took place on Wednesday evening with leaders from all over the world coming together to share experiences and learn about how their chapters and community engagement can be improved.  The information shared in this meeting will be shared in a blog post next week.  Stay tuned for more information.  

Thursday morning saw over 700 hundred attendees queue up for the start of the AppSecEu conference. The Women in AppSec team hosted an early morning breakfast were attendees were asked to speak about their experiences and also what they felt they needed to do to further their careers. With mentors from the OWASP leader community, burning questions were answered.

With four tracks DevSecOps,  Hacking, CISO and Development the conference was full of inspirational and highly technical talks with speakers from over 30 different 

countries. Keynotes from Shannon Leitz, Brian Honan, Jeremiah Grossman and Jaya Baloo provided attendees with current and future trends and research within Application security.

This was also the start of the Hackpra Allstars conference, a one day conference within a conference. Security researchers from all over the world were in attendance to demonstrate security vulnerabilities they they found in some of the biggest and widely used software in the world.  

Thursday evening saw attendees make their way to the Titanic museum for a gala dinner. With harp music, drummers and Irish dancing the evening was filled with excitement and legendary conversations.

Friday saw a number of events including a Women in AppSec diversity panel and the close of a conference which was heavily praised for the sheer talent that was on show.  We would like to thank all of our Speakers, Sponsors, and Attendees for such a great event and welcome you to join us next year for AppSec Europe 2018 in Tel Aviv!