PHDays 8 focused on the "digital underside" and was accompanied by a music festival called Positive Hard Days, which featured six bands from IT companies

The experts spent two days hacking smart grid networks, looking for vulnerabilities in smart contracts, discussing security problems of businesses and government services, and demonstrating techniques for hacking mobile networks, IoT devices, and industrial systems. The star of the festival was a 12-year-old genius who hacked a smart electricity meter.