Until now I had not had enough time to write about my experience at my first Troopers. Due to some good comments about it I had had in mind going to Troopers since some time ago, but for one reason or another I hadn't been able to do it. Last year I had the opportunity to share table with Enno Rey, Troopers organizer and CEO of ERNW, at BlackHat Europe. That time I saw they were a good team and good people, and this year, living closer to Heidelberg, I had no excuses to go.

I arrived in Heidelberg at 3:30AM after 9 hours on the road due to the bad weather conditions. I was able to rest to be ready for the talks in the next morning. I missed the keynote by Rodrigo Branco, but I heard that it was really good. The first talk I attended was “Paparazzi over IP” by Daniel Mende and Pascal Turbing about hacking a CANON camera, equipped with a wireless adapter and other features. The result was that it was possible to see all the photographs taken, control the device remotely and intercept the images while they were about to be sent to a cloud storage.

Then, Steffen Wendzel talked about the future of exfiltration and malicious communication and, after the lunch, Andreas Wiegenstein and Xu Jia talked about SAP systems security. Chema Alonso was supposed to give a talk about IPv6 security after the last break of the day, but he was not able to take the flight to Germany because of the bad weather. However, the Troopers staff found a solution quickly and with his motto “We will leave no man behind” Chema was able to give his talk (even virtually):

Dmitry Sklyarov was the next speaker I listened to, talking about forensics of Flash memories. It was interesting but maybe I would have enjoyed it more with some practical demonstrations.

But there were more things apart of good technical talks. The conference atmosphere was completed with a really cool badge and some activities around the main scenario like soldering tables, a Ultimaker 3D printer at work, etc. Also, you could solder some elements in your own badge to change the display message.

In fact, this was part of a challenge you had to solve to obtain tokens and store them in the Troopers terminals. The more tokens you had the more possibilities you had to win an iPad mini the next day.

The talks were over, but there was another surprise before the end of the day. With the conference ticket all the attendees could have dinner in a boat while it was sailing the Neckar River. After the dinner the PacketWars started. PacketWars is a series of challenges to play individually in a short time to win prizes and fame ;) Without a doubt the first day of the conference had already met all my expectations about Troopers.