Defcon, Black Hat to open this week
Leading cybersecurity events to open in Las Vegas this week; if you prefer security shows at which the speakers favor black T-shirts and dyed hair over suits and ties, and where goth-attired groupies and script kiddies hunkered over laptops line the hallways at all hours of the night, you should attend
CNet News’s Elinor Mills likes the same security shows we do. She likes those shows at which there are no sales pitches, the speakers favor black T-shirts and dyed hair over suits and ties, and the talks tend to be controversial enough to prompt legal threats and even arrests. She is talking, of course, about Defcon, which starts Thursday and runs through Sunday. She notes that the event turns part of the Las Vegas strip into a geek equivalent of “Animal House” for a three-day weekend every summer.
Started in 1993 by Jeff Moss, aka Dark Tangent, Defcon brings together some of the top security experts from around the world, along with thousands of hacker wannabes whose pranks in previous years — hacking the elevators and ATMs or cementing the toilets — have led to bans at certain hotels. “One good thing about the [economic] downturn is that the Riviera Hotel has been easier to deal with,” said Moss, who was named to the Homeland Security Advisory Council. “They’re letting us have access to the pool, so we’ll have pool parties, and they’ve allowed us to do more social things that we wanted to do.”
In addition to being a hacker playground and summer camp, Defcon is a semi-neutral ground where people who blur the lines of legality mingle with federal agents whose job it is to hunt them down. Moss also heads up Defcon’s big-sister conference, Black Hat, whose briefings schedule runs Wednesday and Thursday at the more upscale but no less kitschy Caesars Palace (Black Hat training sessions started over the weekend).
Mills writes that while Black Hat is more professional, with vendor tables in the lobby and respectable product presentations in meeting rooms, Defcon is a chaotic tableau of goth-attired groupies, script kiddies hunkered over laptops lining the hallways at all hours of the night, and gray-haired hackers who were likely teens when they first started coming to the event.
The presentations are usually top-notch (many of them duplicates from the more expensive Black Hat show), but Defcon is known just as much for the activities going on outside of the sessions. There is Hacker Jeopardy, Hacker Karaoke, an artwork contest, geo-caching events, a beverage cooling contraption contest, organized target shooting, a Capture the Flag penetration testing competition, lock picking workshops, a PGP Key Signing Party, DJs, a scavenger hunt, the highly popular Spot
