Reboot and a Summary of ROOTCON 6

What would happen to civilization if one uneventful day, someone hacked and shutdown the power supply all over the world? It’s a total reboot. It’s something that might not happen but posed as a philosophical question on the movie we watched at a conference.

You see last, September 7-8, I joined ROOTCON 6 at Parklane. Dubbed as the a premier information security conference in the Philippines, it was well attended by around 100+ participants who gathered for 2-days to discuss topics such as cyber espionage, advergaming, malwares, and virtualization among others.

Among the things that were done in the conference, the movie showing was most memorable for me. Probably because it’s more enticing when you see something on screen or maybe just because I’m a visual learner.

The Reboot Movie

[SPOILER WARNING]

Although it had less than awesome reviews, the movie’s ending posed a philosophical question: What would happen if you do a reboot on civilization starting with stopping power sources? Lots of bad things maybe.

But aside from that, it shows the underlying battle between whitehat and blackhat hackers. The story starts with the heroine’s home trashed. She can’t remember who she is. Worst part is that there’s a smartphone glued to her hand. It starts like that. And the movie was funded through Kickstarter. Here’s a trailer if you’re interested:

The Keynote: Cyber Espionage

I chatted a bit with the ROOTCON Founder Mr. Dax Labrador and learned some notes on the status of cybersecurity here in the PH.

The topic for this year’s CON – Cyber Espionage – was picked because of the recent and relevant issue between Philippines and China over territories. It would be noted that on the last article I contributed for GMA, the Pinoy hackers made their move against China by defacing websites. Read more here.

Much like ecommerce, information security is still at an infancy stage here in the Philippines. “The goal of the conference is to let people know that cyber espionage really exists. Even at the corporate level, we can see this.”, Labrador said.

He explained that cyber espionage is using weaknesses of systems to gain information on the strength of a country for example. “Before you make your move, you want to know its strengths and weaknesses.”, he added.

The good news though is that even if the country is still in its infancy stage, our government is well on its way to understanding the workings of the community and realizing that not all hackers are bad guys.

“Through gatherings like ROOTCON, we bridge enterprise, government and underground hacker community to truly understand information security.”, Labrador concludes.