MonkeHacks #64

Sydney, Solo Travel (Again), Workshop

Author

Monke
May 19, 2025

MonkeHacks #64

I was feeling very drained this week, and I wasn’t entirely sure why - thankfully I’m back to full energy levels now. I’ve booked a ton of travel in June - more on that below - and it seems that we’re beginning to enter the busy conference season so expect plenty of good writeups in the coming months. Anyway, let’s look at this week.

Loch Leven, about an hour from Edinburgh. Beautiful view but there were a lot of mayflies…

Weekly Ideas / Notes 

  • Big news of the week: I was invited to H1-6102 in Sydney next month! This is my fourth HackerOne LHE - as usual I’m really looking forward to it. Each time I take part in a LHE, I’m better prepared than the last one - so I’ll give it my best shot.

  • Afterwards, I plan to travel to New Zealand to visit a friend of mine in Auckland, and then onwards alone to Taipei in Taiwan. I still love solo travel - it’s very fulfilling to see new places and meet new people - but it’s important, if you’re considering it yourself, to understand that solo travel doesn’t solve any of your problems. It’s an amazing way to develop your worldview, but it doesn’t solve anything. It just gives you more experiences and lessons that you can apply to your life back home. I still highly recommend it.

  • I recorded my NahamCon talk this week. The contents should be pretty good but I recorded it at 3am, so forgive my slow and tired voice. It’s not my proudest work - but nonetheless I hope you find it valuable. I’ve got my client-side hacking workshop coming up as part of Bsides Dublin on May 24. See you there, maybe!

  • James Kettle (albinowax), web hacking deity, has announced the title of his upcoming Blackhat talk: “HTTP/1 Must Die! The Desync Endgame”. Do not, under any circumstances, miss this work in August. As hackers, this is gold dust being bestowed to us.

  • Mostly, this week, I was pentesting. For some reason, I was utterly exhausted - so I spent most of my free time trying to recover. Thankfully I’m back to operational pace now. I went to Loch Leven, a lake about an hour north of Edinburgh, which was pretty nice.

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