Ekoparty
loreeventshacking
Stands for: Ekoparty - Latin America's biggest hacking conference (Buenos Aires, since 2001)
Latin America's biggest hacking conference: Buenos Aires, every year since 2001, where the region's security community - and more than a few world-class vulnerabilities - come out on stage.
Founded in 2001 by five Argentine hackers, Ekoparty grew from a small local gathering into the continent's meeting point: 10,000-plus attendees, villages, wargames, lockpicking, wardriving heritage, and a week of trainings around the core days (the 22nd edition runs at the Centro de Convenciones de Buenos Aires in 2026). Its stage has world stature - the BEAST TLS attack was unveiled at Ekoparty 2011, CRIME followed there in 2012 - proof that first-rank offensive research speaks Spanish and Portuguese too. For Latin American researchers, an Ekoparty talk is the hometown equivalent of a Vegas main stage.
Ekoparty began in 2001 as a small gathering of five Argentine hackers and became the meeting point for security research across Latin America, drawing tens of thousands to Buenos Aires for a week of trainings, villages, wargames and talks.
Its significance is regional rather than merely large. Serious offensive security research in Latin America had no obvious venue: the major conferences were in the northern hemisphere, expensive to reach and conducted in English, so work done in the region was either presented abroad or not at all. Ekoparty created somewhere for that work to be presented in Spanish, to the people it was most relevant to, without a visa application.
The pattern is worth noticing because it repeats. A technical community that cannot gather does not develop a shared standard of what good work looks like, and the researchers stay isolated from each other while remaining perfectly aware of the international scene. Conferences function as the thing that turns scattered practitioners into a field, which is why the regional ones matter disproportionately to the people who could not have attended the others.
Also known as: ekoparty, eko