ShmooCon 2022

Two team members from Intrada Technologies recently attended ShmooCon, a three-day east coast cybersecurity conference held in Washington D.C., where they placed 6th in the Picnic ShmicNic Challenge (ShmooCon Puzzle). 

Congratulations to Cybersecurity Engineer Jaxson Engelman and Software Engineer / Linux System Administrator Adam Post for your hard work and relentless effort to solve one of the annual event’s complex and complicated puzzles. This year's puzzle was comprised of nine stages. Each stage had separate clues linking them together. One stage required participants to find and examine several different attendee badges found around the conference. These badges, when read correctly, contained a series of six-bit encoded characters, among which was a hint to the cipher used on another puzzle stage.

Close to 2,000 professionals in the cybersecurity and information technology industries attended this annual event created by the Shmoo Group. The Shmoo Group is a non-profit think-tank comprised of security professionals worldwide who donate their free time and energy to information security research and development. Each year, The Shmoo Group makes sure they give back to the community. They donate proceeds from their conference t-shirt sale to several non-profits, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Capital Area Food Bank, and Hackers for Charity. 

The conference involves several speed talks about different topics about cybersecurity, various challenges, contests, and puzzles for attendees to attempt to solve, and plenty of networking with colleagues from around the country.

While Jaxson has attended the conference in the past, this was Adam’s first year. However, both are already looking forward to attending next year’s event.

For a complete listing of speakers, event schedule, and conference information, please visit www.shmoocon.org.