8.8
loreeventssecurity
Stands for: 8.8 Computer Security Conference - Chile's technical hacking conference, wrapped in pop culture
Chile's technical hacking conference - '100% técnico y académico', wrapped every year in a different pop-culture theme, from The Matrix to Unreal.
Founded in Santiago in 2011 and co-created by Gabriel Bergel, 8.8 Computer Security Conference set out to 'democratize knowledge and build community' - and measured itself into a regional institution: over its first 16 years, more than 90 events, 500-plus speakers, and 27,000-plus attendees across eight countries, plus spinoffs like 8.8 Gobierno run with Chile's national CSIRT. The signature is tone: rigorous content inside a colorful, pop-culture-soaked frame (the 15th edition dressed as The Matrix; 2026's is Unreal). With Ekoparty and DragonJAR it completes the southern circuit where Latin America's security scene talks to itself.
8dot8 takes its name from the magnitude of the 2010 Chilean earthquake, which is a deliberate and unusual choice for a security conference: it names the event after a national catastrophe rather than after a technology.
That framing tells you the intent. The conference established itself as a serious technical gathering for the Chilean and wider Southern Cone security community, in a country whose scene had no equivalent venue, and the name asserts local identity rather than borrowing the aesthetics of the northern conferences it might otherwise be compared to.
Its existence is part of a broader pattern worth noticing across this glossary's conference entries. Ekoparty in Argentina, DragonJAR in Colombia, H2HC and Roadsec in Brazil, 8dot8 in Chile: each emerged because researchers in a country had no venue that was reachable, affordable and conducted in a language they worked in. Read together they describe a region building its own technical institutions rather than waiting to be included in someone else's, which is a more interesting story than any individual event.
Also known as: 8.8, 8dot8, 8punto8