February meeting at Mobile Vikings

February is usually a very slow month for PHPBenelux because we're recovering from the conference. Our 2014 New Year's resolution is to be less lazy and that's why we're already announcing our February meetup.

The guys at Mobile Vikings approached us and we're very happy they'll be hosting our next meetup. Their offices in Hasselt will be the place to be on February 12th.

The schedule goes as follows:

19:00 - 19:30: Welcome and drinks
19:20 - 19:30: Intro
19:30 - 20:30: PHP in the Cloud (by Maarten Huijsman (https://twitter.com/lukin0110) & Bert Wijnants (https://twitter.com/bertwww))
20:30 - 20:45: Break
20:45 - 21:45: Code Obfuscation, PHP Shells & More: What hackers do once they get passed your code (by Mattias Geniar (https://twitter.com/mattiasgeniar))
21:45 - 22:00: Raffle, Announcements, Feedback
22:00 - ??:??: Networking and drinks

PHP in the Cloud (by Maarten Huijsman & Bert Wijnants)

The era of classic hosting packages is over. There are plenty of options to host your application/website in the cloud, even for free. We'll dive into the different options that are currently available. You'll get more insight on how to deploy, run and manage your PHP applications on PaaS or IaaS services. For example: heroku, php cloud, aws, google cloud, ... What are the pro's and the con's of each platform, why and when to use.

About Maarten

Maarten Huijsmans (https://twitter.com/lukin0110) works at Mobile Vikings as Software Engineer. He mainly focuses and backend coding and devops. He developed already quite some projects on AWS in variety of technology stacks.

About Bert

Bert Wijnants (https://twitter.com/bertwww) works at Mobile Vikings as Frontend and Mobile Engineer. He has a lot of experience with JavaScript and PHP. Currently he's working on some Android and iOS apps.

Code Obfuscation, PHP Shells & More: What hackers do once they get passed your code (by Mattias Geniar)

What happens when protecting applications fail? What do hackers do once they’ve gained access to your source code, database and server? This talk will highlight some of the code obfuscation techniques used by hackers, as well as PHP shells and other backdoors used to keep access to a system. This talk will also include several methods of scanning and fixing both applications and servers from a breach, finding malicious code and removing it.

About Mattias

Mattias (https://twitter.com/mattiasgeniar) is a senior system engineer at a Belgian hosting provider, Nucleus. While working in a hosted environment, great focus is given to high availability, scalability and performance, as well as security, monitoring and reporting. The day-to-day activities include automating management of all servers and offering client support for the managed cluster setups.