This week I attended my first Cybersecurity conference at the Estoril Convention Center called C-days. It was organized by the National Cybersecurity Centre here in Portugal.
I’ve been connecting with people on LinkedIn to learn about their paths on how they got into this industry and I was lucky to find this conference, one day before registrations started. So I got a sit on the Workshops that I really wanted to see: Using AI for Ethical Hacking and How to start a Cybersecurity Startup.
I was happy that I understood most of the topics and tools used during the Ethical Hacking workshop but I realized I’m still a newbie and have a lot to learn.
I learned about vibe coding and its vulnerabilities and what a hackbot is (A hackbot can be defined as any automated system that uses AI in a meaningful way in order to find vulnerabilities).
On the last part of the workshop, the founder of Ethiack showed us how to use Cybersecurity AI (CAI) to solve a CTF challenge. I was a bit more confused on that part and I’m going to check the pdf (https://github.com/ethiack/ai4eh/blob/main/ai-for-ethical-hacking.pdf) with more detail to see if I can learn more about it. I found that CAI is one of the first open AI systems available designed to help anyone perform offensive security testing. CAI is an open source hackbot and you can find it on GitHub: https://github.com/aliasrobotics/cai.
Now, I was curious about how to start a Cybersecurity startup because it might be something I will do in the future. The speaker advised everyone, before starting a startup, we should start on a big company to see how everything works. That’s my plan but it doesn’t need to be a big company. I wouldn’t mind starting on a startup as well but I do want to learn how does a company work in all levels. He also advised us to focus on one industry.
Then I got the opportunity to listen to André Pinheiro, the Chief of Offensive Services of Art Resilia, and he talked about the obstacles of starting a Startup. I loved how he kept it real. It was fun listening to him.
I’m hoping I can join more conferences because I wanna be part of this industry and meet people that I can learn from. I’m gonna try to be more proactive so I can give back to the community as I learn.
