44CON’s a bit different to some other cons in that we tend to run our own Thursday night entertainment instead of a traditional sponsor party. Sponsors and others are welcome to run their own events if they prefer, and indeed, this year some are. Last year was a little quiet, mostly due to Steve not being well enough to plan things.

If you’ve never been to a 44CON, or if last year was your first, you might not expect much, but this year we have a lot going on.

First of all, the biggest of big big shout outs go to our dear friends and Gold sponsors, HackerOne, without whom this night wouldn’t happen. HackerOne are sponsoring the entire evening, so make sure you thank them for helping out. We’ll have complementary food and drinks from Gin O’Clock onwards courtesy of our Gin O’Clock sponsors Crowdfense, up till 19:00, and at various points and places in the evening from 19:50 onwards courtesy of HackerOne. As well as a selection of Alcoholic drinks, we’ll also have a fantastic Mint and Elderflower Fizz mocktail and soft drinks for those who want to keep things light.

The evening session starts at 19:00 with Pwning the 44CON Nerf Gun, by Chris Wade and Dave Lodge of PenTest Partners. This is no ordinary stunt hack talk. The Nerf Terrascout is pretty well put together for a toy tank, and it took the PTP guys a heck of a lot of effort in reversing proprietary RF protocols, manipulating the SPI bus and all kinds of wacky techniques, all to hijack the controller in real-time so they can shoot Steve. This is rather odd, as it’s absolutely not going to happen. The crew won’t let Steve get shot…. honest!

Nicky Bloor will be running a two-hour workshop from 20:00 on Diving Deep into Deserialization, starting with an overview, then diving through exploit and gadget chains into a CTF-style VM for you to play along with (so don’t forget your laptop). Expect this to bend your head a little, but you’ll come out of the other side made of steel.

Looking for something more blue team than red? From 20:00, Phillipe Arteau will run a two-hour workshop on Machine Learning with the Orange data visualization, machine learning and data mining toolkit. His workshop, Orange is the new Hack is essential for anyone conducting triage and will take you through implementing vulnerability classification at scale. The same skillset can be applied to other contexts such as malware classification, system alert classification and vulnerability management.

While the workshops are going on, we’ll have Duckies Den in Track 1 from 20:00. Pitch your ideas to our panel of industry duckies, who’ll award beer tokens accordingly. Our sponsors will also get short pitch slots… but the audience get the beers. This year’s theme for our attendees is “Zany cybersecurity ideas that don’t exist, and probably shouldn’t”. Prizes will be awarded for:

• Best billed idea
• Most lame duck pitch
• Most quackers concept

Could your idea be the nest big thing? Which pitches will fly, and which will sink without a trace? Waddle our panel of duckies take under their wing? Will our sponsors earn a feather in their cap, or will they cry fowl play? It’s not just an eggscuse for duck puns, but we’re sure avian will have a good time!

If it’s all a bit too much and you want to veg out in front of a film, we’ll be screening all-time classic The Big Lebowski in the coffee area from 20:00. Chill out on the sofas, grab some snacks and see what happens when you meet a stranger in the alps. If you don’t like The Big Lebowski, well, that’s just your opinion, man.

Last year we had Linux Kernel poetry and Yoga. This year we’re looking for lightning talks with a twist in our Lightning Talk Poetry Slam from 22:00 in Track 1. Slots are 5-15 minutes long, and should feature either in part or in hole, some form of poetry. Haikus, Limericks and epic Rap battles are most welcome. Sign up at the front desk, then come up, either take a shot of Sourz or try a British snack and SHOW US WHAT U GOT.