InfySEC, which specialises in training and consulting on information security, hosted E-Hack, the world’s largest ethical hacking event at SRM University.
Vinod Senthil, director and chief technical officer at InfySEC, commented on why events like these are important.
“If there is going to be a World War III ever, it is likely to be about computers, data and networks. It is our responsibility to let the end-users know about day-to-day attacks and suggest ways to protect against cyber threats. The best way to do this with the highest impact is to conduct a pan Indian workshop such as E-Hack,” he says.
Packed with almost 9,000 people, there was barely enough space for the organisers to sneak past the tight security.
Apart from those who travelled from places like Shimla and Uttar Pradesh, nearly two lakh viewers saw the event through the live webcast. InfySEC conducted E-Hack x10ded in other locations around the world, including the Rotary Club of Mysore and the University of California, Berkeley.
By roping in eminent speakers to address the audience (Karthikeyan Murugesan, founder of Zazvik Solutions; Santhosh Srinivasan, director of Symantec; Patrick Martinent, a Google developer expert, among others), conducting workshops, and offering attractive prizes for various contests, the Chennai-based ethical hacking company ensured that its participants got the most out of this experience.
Though the event itself was aimed at “educating and taking a less known field to the masses,” the event got its fair share of recognition. E-Hack left its mark in the Asia Book of Records, the Indian Book of Records as well as the Tamil Nadu Book of Records. “This shows that we are moving in the right path in our efforts to educate the end users,” says Vinod.
Organising something on the scale of E-Hack could not have come without its own set of hurdles. “Our biggest problem was finding a venue. For an auditorium, we were talking in numbers that are multiples of 10,000,” says Vinod.
“We also faced issues online with regard to the bandwidth, network usage and computer process usage despite using prominent cloud providers for our vulnerable applications.”
With an event of this size and innovation, it is difficult to pinpoint a USP. While the organising team hopes that it is the learning that participants took away at the end of the day, the contestants differ.
“I have been to a few hackathons before but they had only between 50 and 100 people. It is a completely enriching feeling to be surrounded by other geeks who are thinking about technology as much as you,” says Gopi Haran, a participant. InfySEC’s E-Hack managed to draw crowds from all around the world and unite them for a single objective — to be inquisitive about securing ourselves and to empower ourselves against potential cyber vulnerability.
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