Continuing on from last year (and many years previously); Black Hat offered 100 students the opportunity to apply for free admission to the conference. I took them up on this opportunity, and for the second year running, I was lucky enough to be awarded the Black Hat Europe student scholarship.
Much like last year, I found the briefings to be exceptional. Of particular note was 'Ghost in the PLC: Designing an undetectable programmable logic controller rootkit' by Ali Abbasi and Majid Hashemi, 'Another Brick off the Wall: Deconstructing web application firewalls using automata learning' by George Argyros and Ioannis Stais as well as 'Ego Market: When people's greed for fame benefits large-scale botnets' by Masarah Paquet-Clouston and Olivier Bilodeau.I have come away from Black Hat Europe feeling inspired and freshly reminded that there are many, many individuals who are also so incredibly enthusiastic and passionate about technology and security.
Black Hat have been so generous for the past 2 years to fund me to attend their conference and I look forward to attending next year. Although, Considering this is my final academic year, its probably about time I paid my own way (or have a generous employer who would do so on my behalf)!