Objective-See's Blog

"Objective by the Sea" v2.0

relive the world's only mac security conference

June 11, 2019

“Objective by the Sea” is our Mac Security Conference.

It is founded on simple principles and ideas such as:

Free: No attendance fee is charged to any students or patrons of Objective-See. #SharingIsCaring

By the Sea: The venue is always held in a beautiful location by the ocean or sea.

Community: Limited to 100 attendees, the conference organically facilitates connections & community.

Giving Back: Each year, we raise money for a local charity or worthy cause!

Background

About a year ago my good friend Andy asked a simple, yet (what would prove to be) a history-altering question: “Patrick, why don’t you organize a Mac Security Conference!?”.

I pondered this for about two seconds, before realizing this was a stellar idea.

After coming up with a clever name and working with a graphic designer to create a lovely logo, “Objective by the Sea” (#OBTS) v1.0 was a go!

However we decided to plan the conference a little differently.

First and foremost we decided only allow attendance to students and patreon supporters of Objective-See (even at $1). This allowed us to avoid charging people to attend, as we believe sharing information should be free!
Second, we decided to exclusively accept talks about macOS/iOS security topics.

After many months of hard work, “Objective by the Sea” v1.0 was launched on November 2019, on the lovely island of Maui, Hawaii. Bringing together many of the world’s top security macOS & iOS security researchers, hackers, mac admins, and more, the conference was an amazing experience!

If you missed it, check our the photo album of all the fun!

#OBTS v2.0

After the success of #OBTS v1.0, we decided to go international and plan #OBTS v2.0 in Europe! 💥

Location:

“Objective by the Sea” v2.0 was held in early June 2019 on the shores of the Mediterranean sea, at the Le Meridian in sunny Monte-Carlo Monaco.

Speakers:

“Objective by the Sea” v2.0 included almost twenty speakers, including many of the world’s top macOS and iOS security researchers:

Ian Beer

Sarah Edwards

Jaron Bradley

Joshua Hill

Richie Cyrus

Luca Todesco

Erika Noerenberg

Patrick Wardle

Linus Henze

Csaba Fitzl

Thomas Reed

Cody Thomas

Felix Seele

Omer Zohar

Josh Long

Sergei Shevchenko

Josh Watson

Samuel Keeley

Talks:

Slides and videos of the talks, will be posted shortly!

The lineup of talks at “Objective by the Sea” v2.0 were unparalleled, covering topics such as macOS/iOS:

exploits & 0days
malware & adware
offensive & defensive tools

For a great overview of the talks check out the following writeups:

“Objective by the Sea 2.0” by our Friends over at the SecureMac.
“Mac Security by the Sea” by Mikey, aka 0xmachos.

Or for more details and talk abstracts, hop over to the page of conference talks.

It was an honor to have such in-depth talks grace the stage at #OBTS v2.0. It even caught the eye of the media allowing our contributions to span throughout the community:

Charity:

At each #OBTS, we design custom conference T-Shirts to raise money for charity.

100% of T-Shirts sales go to the selected charity. Moreover, Objective-See matches 100% of donated amount! #2x

This year, we selected the Equidad charity, due to their amazing work in Andy’s home country:

We were humbled by our conference attendees who raised over $1000. A match from Objective-See brought the total to $2000+ 🙌

Twitter:

For all conference-related tweets, check out the #OBTS hashtag!

Some of our favorite tweets:

And fun fact!
The conference hashtag was actually trending in Monaco during the conference:

Sponsors:

Producing a conference is rather expensive endeavor. As we don’t charge an attendance fee, we depend on our patreon supporters and sponsors. To both, we are forever grateful!

Want to support us via patreon? Join us!

Objective by the Sea is made possible by the generosity of the following companies and products:

Gold 🥇