This page has been pretty quiet for a while, but we assure you it’s not because Neg9 is dead. It’s more the result of us being a healthy combination of lazy and busy.

So then what have we been up to?

• A large gathering of Neg9 members from across the country swarmed on Shadow House in June to participate in ddtek’s Defcon CTF qualifications. It was a long weekend fueled by hacking and scary-potent homebrew Club-Mate dubbed Shadow-Mate. Overall, with 2500 points we placed 26th out of the 280 teams that posted scores. While not good enough to qualify, it was still a score to be proud of and we’ve identified where our weaknesses are.

• Several Neg9 members presented at ToorCon Seattle 2011, with most of the other Seattle-area crew attending. Presenters included Marcus Hodges' (meta) talk titled Highly concurrent Python for brute forcing and discovery and Aaron Grattafiori (dyn) and Tom Daniels' talk titled Apple OS X Enterprise Security: Kick it to the Kerb. After all of the talks, ToorCon wrapped up with the after party hosted at Shadow House.

• A large portion of Neg9 participated in the OpenCTF challenge at Defcon 19. With only one vuvuzela-related incident, the team worked hard through the weekend. Neg9 sat in 2nd or 3rd place through most of the competition, but Vegas started to take its toll and we slipped into 4th place on the final day of the competition. Like quals, every competition and event is a chance to learn where our strengths and weaknesses are and to make changes to ensure we do better next time.

• We’re currently preparing to participate in CSAW CTF 2011 Qualifications. Since the actual competition is for undergrad academic teams, we can’t qualify, so this one’s just for fun and practice.

• Neg9 DEDICATICON 0x05 is just around the corner; planning and ramp-up for that should begin any day now…

All that, plus the normal day jobs, 2621 parties, side projects, other hacker cons, partying and hacking and before you know it, it’s been half a year since a blog post.