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The contests at this year's Positive Hack Days included MeterH3cker, an all-new competition for hacking the smart grid. Participants had the run of two mock buildings powered by solar panels; excess power was sold back to the grid at a special rate. The job of the participants was to interfere with metering by any means necessary in order to improve their account balance.

Mr. Robot again cheered guests of Positive Hack Days. This year, people could not only play a quiz, but also upgrade their skills using hacking tools or even have an interview for a job at Positive Technologies! Over 2,000 people came to have a talk with our chatbot, and that certainly boosted its artificial ego :) Keep reading for more details.

More than 5,000 visitors came to Positive Hack Days this year, the majority of them security professionals. Their creativity and fine-tuned technical intuition were on full display in the hacking contests. CAMВreaker was no exception. In this article, we describe the preparations, techniques, and victors in this marathon of IP camera hacking.

In May 2017, Positive Hack Days VII presented a brand new contest named HackBattle, which attracted audience attention. Almost 100 security specialists took part in that contest. The audience was so eager to see the final that the area was packed (more details in the last year's review). Inspired by professionals' interest, we decided to hold HackBattle 2.0 at PHDays 8. Learn how the contest passed this year, and check if you can solve the tasks.

Held in the weeks leading up to Positive Hack Days, the Competitive Intelligence contest offered a chance to compete at open-source online sleuthing. This year, the contest had a bit of cryptostartup flair: tasks centered around NotSoPositive, a fictional small company holding a typical ICO. The company's imaginary founders and employees, as well as their friends and family, went under the microscope. To succeed, competitors needed to have intricate knowledge of the workings of online services and social networks, combined with skill at making inferences and inspired guesses.

Positive Hack Days 8 continued a number of fun traditions from past years, among them the Leave ATM Alone contest. All comers were invited to hack two ATMs provided by our Banking Security partner Alfa Bank (to make things easier for hackers, we specially configured and hid vulnerabilities on the ATMs prior to the contest start). Participants had 15 minutes to bypass security and cash out. Around 40 participants tried their luck, with a total of 40,000 rubles at stake. Leonid Krolle, the Positive Technologies banking security researcher in charge of the contest, told us about the twists and turns that followed.

The eighth annual Positive Hack Days has wrapped up. Over 5,200 participants gathered in Moscow to watch hackers intercept mobile signals, take cash from an ATM, fool smart utility meters (one of the hackers was 12 years old!), and pull off dozens of other technical feats. True drama was in the air during the finale of the attacker-versus-defender showdown at The Standoff.