The HITCON hacking congress is seeking to help companies and individuals learn survival skills in a virtual world where cyberwarfare and hacking attacks have become increasingly common, the Association of Hackers in Taiwan said at its opening at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center yesterday.
“The world is being affected by the Russia-Ukraine war. Taiwan is a frontier of cyberwarfare and needs to pay attention to the situation and learn the necessary survival skills from hackers,” said Mars Cheng (鄭仲倫), a member of the association’s organizing team.
The annual event, which drew more than 1,000 participants this year, is Taiwan’s largest security technology conference for hackers, who gathered to “share the latest and advanced security technology, and have discussions with everyone,” the event’s Web site said.
Photo: Tien Yu-hua, Taipei Times
More than 30 security research reports and state-of-the-art technologies are to be presented at the two-day meeting, themed “Survival Guide for the Cyber War,” the association said.
Cheng, a cyberthreat researcher at TXOne Networks’ IoT/ICS Security Research Labs and Trend Micro, said the hacking conference started with 50 participants 18 years ago, but now also influences the hacking scenes in Japan and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
As information security has grown “explosively” in many areas over the past few years, human resources demand and technology development have also soared, Cheng said.
Information security has become a subject “about which people should have at least some knowledge,” he added.
“HITCON hopes to convey to Taiwanese why information security is so important,” he said, citing the example of Moscow’s and Kyiv’s cyberwarfare campaigns since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said Taiwan had been targeted by hybrid cyberwarfare after China launched military exercises around the nation early this month.
She said she hopes Taiwanese can improve their ability to identify misinformation, and that information security professionals will join the government’s efforts to boost the nation’s overall resilience against cyberwarfare.
The organizers said HITCON encourages hackers to put their skills to good use.
“We hope that the energy and the spirit of the hacker community can keep protecting society and enterprises, and simultaneously satisfy the needs of the hacker community and enterprises,” they said on the event’s Web site.
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