Awarded passes for Defcon and AppSec USA 2018

I was awarded Google Travel Grant last year to attend Defcon in Las Vegas. This grant was awarded to 7 people / security professionals throughout USA to encourage them to attend the conference.

This award included conference passes and $500 for travel and accomodation too.

While I was there, I also got a chance to see the google conference.

It was a very good experience for me, Defcon had some very interesting talks. I especially liked the villages. Blue team village is somewhere where I picked up a few ideas that can help me in my current role. It was also a very good chance to network with other security professionals.

I also got awarded free passes to attend Appsec USA in San jose last year. It is much smaller than Defcon but the technical content presented is good. The top 3 talks I enjoyed were on Identity Theft : Attacks on SSO (Single Sign On) Systems, Breaking Bot and Fraud detection solutions and Defensible Application Security for the Artificial Intelligence Era.

Overall I feel lucky for being able to attend both these conferences last year.