Civo Navigate & Synapse Summit 2023

Our first event was Civo Navigate which took place on the 7th and 8th of February at Armature Works in Tampa, a thriving venue with everything an up-and-coming tech event should require. During the event the Civo team revealed this was the first of the Navigate series, with a second Navigate planned for the UK. We can’t wait to hear more about it!

As a gold sponsor, we were perfectly pitched near the entrance of the main stage, offering delegates an array of Defense.com swag and the opportunity to learn how to pick locks. With ethical hackers among our team, it was a no brainer that they’d want to show off some of their tricks of the trade.

The event was packed with talks and workshops focused on navigating and succeeding within the cloud native landscape, and the first day kicked off in style with a fascinating talk by Apple Co-Founder, Steve Wozniak. He began talking about his childhood and how he first got into computing.

‘Woz’ then gave an insight into how he developed and designed the Apple I and Apple II, which became highly successful, mass-produced microcomputers in the mid to late 1970s, and also cleared up some misconceptions about the role he and Steve Jobs played.

A notable comment that he made was regarding artificial intelligence where he spoke about his doubts surrounding the hype as he feels nothing can compare to the human brain.

Interested in knowing more? Check out Civo CEO Mark Boost’s first-hand account of what it was like interviewing the ‘Woz’

Meeting Steve Wozniak

After his main stage talk, Woz treated some of the VIP guests of the event to some more tales over a superb brunch put on by Oak & Ola. He then stuck around for a few chats and photos, with our CEO, Oliver Pinson-Roxburgh, being one of the lucky ones. Here’s what Oli had to say about meeting Steve Wozniak:

“It was cool, he spoke about pivoting and not being afraid to change your plan as a business. It was a great opportunity to meet and hear from someone who has a technology focused view on business, it was really refreshing.”

Can we also take a moment to applaud the Marketing team for the amazingly placed Defense.com banner that sneaked into the background of all the photos? No? Just us? Ok, moving on…

Main Stage Talk

On the second day of Civo Navigate, Oliver Pinson-Roxburgh took to the main stage to deliver his talk on ‘bad guys and how they hack it’. Sharing insights into general cybersecurity best practices as well as war stories from the frontline of Penetration Testing, including how we once managed to hack into the building of a bank! But we couldn’t go to a cloud native event without sharing tips on container security, so here’s a sneak peak of some of the content shared.

In this overview of the attack surface Oli covered the 4Cs of security – Cloud, Cluster, Container and Code:

Finishing off his talk, Oli asked the audience to put their security skills to the test. We showed how we managed to hack an AWS environment using techniques seen every day in the wild. The scenario was to hack a web application that is used by companies to send health check requests to custom addresses. Could our audience figure out how we did it? The audience had the challenge of figuring out how he did it and anyone able to tell us got their hands on an exclusive retro Gameboy!

We finished off with a Q&A session where delegates had the opportunity to pick Oli’s brain on all things security. This was a fantastic way to kick off day two and it only got better from here…

Hacking Workshop

From the main stage to the kitchen (aka the Show and Tell room), Oli then delivered his workshop session: Learn to Hack – Discover Pen Testers Secret Weapons.

This was a very popular session with all seats in the Show and Tell room filled and some people pulling in seats along the back row. It was great to see so many people keen to see how hacking works and put their skills to the test.

Oli kicked off the session by explaining how the main stage hack was achieved and then went onto discuss the key concepts that would be covered during the workshop hack which included:

• SQL injection (SQLi)
• Session management
• Command injection
• Cross-site scripting (XSS)
• Insecure direct object reference (IDOR)

Once we had introduced the basics, it was down to our delegates to figure out the rest and simulate their own hack. With a little help from our team, all attendees managed to complete all four stages of the hack and were officially welcomed to the Syndicate. We had a great time seeing how everyone tackled each task differently and we hope they learned something new, too!

Thank you Civo for organising and hosting such a great event. We can’t wait for the next one!

For more information about Civo Navigate and to check out the highlights check out their page here: Civo Navigate Tampa 2023