Last week I got to experience the DEF CON hacker’s conference in Las Vegas for the first time.  If you aren’t familiar with the conference, it is one of the world’s largest hacker conventions, and this year was its 25^th annual convention.  DEF CON is considered an “underground” event because it is community driven and doesn’t have any major corporate sponsors, yet it attracts roughly 30,000 people such as computer security professionals, journalists, lawyers, federal government employees, security researchers, and students from all over the world.  You can read more about the event here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEF_CON

https://defcon.org/html/defcon-25/dc-25-index.html

I’ve attended over a hundred IT focused conferences in my life, but for some reason DEF CON never made my list.  I don’t know why I hadn’t attended before – I guess I never really “got” the community.  But this past year I read “Ghost in the Wires” by Kevin Mitnick and gained a much better understanding of what makes this community unique, so I decided to add DEF CON to my list. Continue reading “I was a DEF CON Virgin” →