Campus Party, the Biggest Technology Camp in the World!

Campus Party is considered the world’s most important event in the areas of Innovation, Creativity, Science and Digital Entertainment. This time it was the Mexican 4th edition and took place July 31^st to August 4^th in Mexico City. Even though the event took place around the same time as DefCon and Black Hat, it had the participation of recognized computer security professionals from Latin America and the attendance was about 8,000 people with more than 500 conferences and workshops.

The first edition took place in Spain in 1997 and has since amassed more than 287,000 people from around the world. Currently annual events take place in countries like; Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Germany, England and USA.

The conferences covered a variety of topics such as: Astronomy, Robotics, Design, Multimedia, Video Games, Social Media, Security and Networking, Open Source Software and Startups.

This event is unique and different, where attendees can camp, eat, even take a bath and have access to workshops, video games, high-speed internet, participate in competitions such as war games or fighting robots and especially meet people who share similar interests.

All conferences, workshops and activities take place during the day, but there are actually 24-hour activities since many attendees stay awake all night. The Campus Party network interconnection is equivalent to four medium-sized cities and as expected, there was a significant number of attempted attacks inside and outside the network.

This event was attended in past editions by personalities like; Al Gore, Tim Berners-Lee, Kevin Mitnick, Michio Kaku, Steve Wozniak, Neil Armstrong and on this occasion; Buzz Aldrin, Spencer Tunick and Nolan Bushnell.

Of course there were very interesting talks on a myriad of subjects as; Bitcoins Mining, Quantum key Distribution Schema, Space Robotics, The first Smart Glasses made in Mexico and What a programmer should know to develop a video game.

By Kaspersky Lab, Dmitry Bestuzhev (@dimitribest) Head of Global Research and Analysis Team Latin America gave a Video presentation: “Mobile Malware in Mexico and its static analysis“.

and I presented on “The new Internet Threats“.

It was interesting the number of talks related to critical infrastructure protection or cyber espionage. This is due to the great interest shown in these subjects recently. There were even presentations about the legality of ethical hacking according to local laws and about new personal data protection law due to the large number of security breaches and illegal trade of information in the black market.

For 2014, the Mexican edition of Campus party will be moved for the first time outside of Mexico City and will be held in the city of Zapopan (Guadalajara metropolitan area), the next edition of Campus Party Europe will be in London from 2^nd to 7^th September, 2013.

No doubt this is an event where professionals, students and entrepreneurs meet to realize ideas, share knowledge or start businesses and new projects, you should live this experience!