Hack Our Jibo at Black Hat!

by Chris Brook on Thursday August 22, 2024

When we began planning for this year's Black Hat, we were excited by the idea of giving one lucky attendee a Jibo, a cute, social family robot.

Like Digital Guardian, the robot was born in Boston. Billed as the "world's first family robot," Jibo was founded by a MIT roboticist. Last fall Jibo even landed on TIME Magazine's coveted list of the 25 Best Inventions of 2017, alongside the iPhone X and the Tesla Model 3.

Cut to last month, just weeks before Black Hat: We learned the future of Jibo may not be so bright.

The company hasn't officially gone out of business – yet – but it looks like our little robot friend may soon be in the market for a new gig.

That’s not stopping us from bringing Jibo to the desert though. We’re making the best of the situation and plan to have Jibo accompany us to Black Hat so he can rub elbows with infosec’s best and brightest.

He’ll be on the job hunt and live tweeting from the conference (at @DGjibo) all next week.

We’re also inviting Black Hat attendees to swing by the Digital Guardian booth (#920) to meet Jibo, take a selfie with him, or ask him about cybersecurity. And if you’re interested, you can live connect to Jibo and use the Jibo Maker app to hack our Jibo. What can you make him do?

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas but we’ll be doing our best to keep him out of mischief. Maybe we can even line up a new job for the little guy before we give him away!

Jibo image courtesy: Jibo

Tags: Company News

Chris Brook

Chris Brook is the editor of Digital Guardian’s Data Insider blog. He is a cybersecurity writer with nearly 15 years of experience reporting and writing about information security, attending infosec conferences like Black Hat and RSA, and interviewing hackers and security researchers. Prior to joining Digital Guardian–acquired by Fortra in 2021–he helped launch Threatpost, an independent news site that was a leading source of information about IT and business security for hundreds of thousands of professionals worldwide.