The international practical cybersecurity conference OFFZONE 2018 was hosted on November 15–16 at the Digital October venue, where it gathered more than 900 people from 14 countries.

The event included two main report tracks: Main Track and Fast Track, where participants covered the latest developments in cybersecurity. It also featured three thematic zones. Security gurus from the largest financial institutions shared their knowledge at Finance.Zone, experts in application security assessment presented their findings at Web.Zone, hardware researchers spoke about devices and electronics at Hardware.Zone.

Over the 2 days, the visitors heard reports by 52 experts from Russia, Europe, and Asia, including those from ESET, Symantec, and Positive Technologies. Some of the tracks featured BI.ZONE experts who spoke about the prospects of biometric technologies, financial service security, and hardware attack threats.

The conference guests were welcome to test their skills in a range of technical competitions and unique quests set to a postapocalyptic scene from the future. The partners of OFFZONE 2018 who made it happen were Kaspersky Lab, QIWI, and Wallarm.

The main event at the conference was the annual ethical hacking competition CTFZone 2018. This tournament was held by BI.ZONE for the third time, and since its inception in 2016, more than 2,000 teams from around the world have taken the challenge. In 2018, the playoffs were held between 1,000 teams from 50 countries, but only 10 best teams from Russia, Hungary, Poland, South Korea, Ukraine, and China made it to the final round. The intense Attack/Defense cyber battle helped identify the 3 strongest teams to share the $18,000 prize.