Why we sponsor OrangeCon 2026

At XMON we think it is important to support the security community, and OrangeCon is a good example of that.

OrangeCon brings together security professionals, researchers, students and other people interested in cybersecurity. It is not only about talks, but also about meeting people, sharing knowledge and learning from each other. It took place on 4 June at Theater Meervaart in Amsterdam, with several training days before the conference.

The programme covered a wide range of security topics, including penetration testing, incident response, cloud security, fuzzing, red teaming and radio-frequency security. There were also workshops and community villages, where different security groups and non-profit organisations could show what they are working on and talk to visitors.

That mix is one of the reasons we like OrangeCon. You can attend a technical talk, join a workshop, speak with researchers or just have a conversation with people working on completely different parts of security.

Why we support it

For us, sponsoring OrangeCon is mainly about supporting the community behind it. Cybersecurity changes quickly, and a lot of useful knowledge comes from people sharing what they have seen, tested or learned in practice. Conferences like OrangeCon make that easier.

We also like that OrangeCon has a strong community focus and gives space to people who are there to share knowledge, not only to sell something.

That is something we are happy to support, and why XMON sponsored OrangeCon 2025 and 2026

Our top 3 talks from OrangeCon 2026

There were plenty of good talks at OrangeCon, but these three stood out to us.

1. 0days on a Shoestring: Breaking Embedded Systems with LLMs and Junk Hardware - Peter Geissler

A very practical talk about using LLMs and cheap hardware to automate parts of vulnerability research on embedded devices. It also touches on the limits of just pointing an AI at a device and expecting useful results, and how to actually build something that scales. YouTube

2. Strange Inputs, Critical Outputs - Sasha Romijn

This one is a good reminder that security problems do not always come from the obvious input fields. The talk covers vulnerabilities caused by data coming from places like DNS, TLS certificates, Wi-Fi names and other protocol fields. Some of the examples resulted in account takeover, router compromise and impact on internet routing. Pretalx

3. Pwning a Million Point Of Sale Terminals In One Afternoon - Marcel Darmeveil

Probably one of the more approachable talks of the day. Marcel explains how relatively simple API requests gave him remote administrative access to a very large number of Android point-of-sale devices. Besides the technical issue, the talk also covers the responsible disclosure process and what happened when vendors tried to fix the problem. Pretalx

The full recordings are available in both OrangeCon 2026 playlists:

• OrangeCon 2026 - Track 1

• OrangeCon 2026 - Track 2

For the XMON blog, I actually like these three together because they cover AI-assisted vulnerability research, unusual real-world attack surfaces, and a very concrete responsible-disclosure story without making the section too long.