New Year has arrived, which means that the cyberindustry's most eagerly awaited event is already on the horizon: the Positive Hack Days international practical cybersecurity forum, held annually since 2011. This year's event will take place on May 18–19 at the now traditional venue of the World Trade Center Moscow. For those unable to attend in person, an online broadcast of all talks and presentations will be available.

PHDays is a meeting place for hackers, security researchers, key experts, opinion leaders, business heads, government officials, scientists, journalists, and more. Here we not only discuss the latest tech challenges and cybersecurity research, but unwrap the most pressing issues facing business and government, and ways to solve them through information security. Past headliners include: legendary cryptographer Bruce Schneier, co-developer of the FaceDancer tool for USB emulation Travis Goodspeed, co-creator of the concept of public key cryptography Whitfield Diffie, and Embedded Security Lead at NVIDIA Alexander Matrosov.

Last year's anniversary event brought together more than 2,500 guests, and over 35,000 people tuned in to the forum and The Standoff cyberbattle online.

The PHDays formula is time-tested and unchanged: a vast testing ground for experiment, unique insight and expertise, professional on-topic conversations, informal communication with hackers, and lots and lots of practical drills—a place where eyes sparkle with the thrill of discovery.

As in previous years, the eleventh PHDays conference will provide its own surprises, united by the general theme of this year's forum, which we will announce in the near future.

Participants can look forward to a rich program of contests, developed by leading cybersecurity experts. The contests are an important part of the event, helping to visualize the infosec threats around us.

Our traditional mix of open-to-all contests includes: legally attacking a payment system, hacking a smart contract, learning about machine-learning techniques in game-based CTF services, and testing them for robustness. All you need is a laptop, curiosity, and passion.

Observe attacks by ethical hackers on a virtual city-state at The Standoff, cyberrange, where the world's largest open cyberbattle will once again unfold. In November, 65,000 people worldwide followed the cyberspace clash between attackers and defenders. Ten powerful teams of white-hat hackers spent 35 hours non-stop testing the robustness of the city-state's systems. This year's confrontation will feature all-new tasks and targets, corresponding fully to the realities of the current threat climate and corporate infrastructure.

Forum participants will earn recognition from colleagues and make useful contacts in an informal setting—the reports and presentations will be seen by thousands of infosec stars from around the globe. Anything goes at the forum: if you have a cybersecurity report on a burning topic that you want to share, just submit an application. Anyone can be a speaker: from budding specialists to established pros. You have until March 1 to apply. The program committee will consider all submissions by April 1.

Watch this space for more details of the new PHDays forum and The Standoff cyberdrills. In the meantime, get your applications in and mark May 18–19, 2022, in your calendars.

See you at PHDays 2022!