Black Hat Europe 2014 review

Black Hat Europe was held in Amsterdam in October, 2014. The so called Briefings (tech talks) were extremely versatile, ranging from Android pentesting to SCADA hacks. It was difficult to choose which talk to attend - there were around 50 or so, each title vying for your attention ("Hack Your ATM with Friend's Raspberry.Py" [sic], or "Endrun - Secure Digital Communications for Our Modern Dystopia").

I really enjoyed the technical depth of some talks, and it was great to hear someone like Adi Shamir, one of the inventors of the famous RSA algorithm, talk about his current research.

Because of the sheer size I couldn't find one generic takeaway, or see the, or a current bigger picture in information security land. Even all of the vendors' offerings looked similar.

Now that I come to think of it, that actually IS the key takeaway: Genericity.