![]() officials aren’t even all they are cracked up to be. And judging by six bullet points and several hundred words that Joyce - one of the country’s most important cyber officials - emailed POLITICO, it’s clear he means it.ĭEF CON is “the happiest place in the world,” added Chris Inglis, the nation’s first national cyber director, who stepped down in February.įor some, the security risks facing U.S. Joyce, who has attended multiple DEF CONs, said that the technical nature of the conferences meshes well with the work of the National Security Agency. “Most NSA folks would be more comfortable in a room full of DEF CON attendees than they would be at a traditional government event,” said Rob Joyce, the director of the NSA’s Cybersecurity Directorate. But if you pry, it’s clear that showing up to a place like this also is a welcome break from buttoned-up Washington. On paper, the government brass that appear at DEF CON are there to recruit new talent or forge ties to the hacker community. There is the tin foil hat contest, a martial arts competition and countless puzzles and trivia contests. ![]() “DEF CON is as much about security as Comic-Con is about comic books,” said Mick Baccio, the former chief information security officer for Democrat Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign and, more recently, a goon.Ī host of non-cybersecurity events have sprung up at DEF CON. In addition to its own vocabulary, DEF CON has given birth to its own games (“Spot the Fed”), its own swag (nothing here is as valuable as those $440 badges) and its own fashion style, the type that encourages the non-Irish to wear kilts and at least one attendee to strap a Nintendo 64, TV and four controllers onto his back. They even get their own official moniker: “goons.” The several hundred red-shirted security staff like Hathaway who patrol the 550,000 square feet of Caesar’s Forum are all volunteers - a sign of how many people find the event irresistible, despite the security risks. ![]() “PoS doesn’t stand for Piece of Shit, … but it probably should,” said Monika Hathaway, the DEF CON staffer to whom a POLITICO reporter recently handed $440 in cold hard cash, the price of admission into the conference. It’s also because on-site vendors refuse to use point-of-sale devices - which let consumers tap or insert a credit card, for example - for a simple reason: they don’t trust them. In part, that’s because attendees in past years have snuck fake ATMs into DEF CON. Rogers also recommends bringing cash to the event. The staffer, granted anonymity to speak openly about the briefing, said he was advised to turn off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, to avoid bringing unnecessary devices, and, when possible, to use a Faraday bag - a pouch made of conductive metal that can block wireless signals from hitting your phone. ![]() One White House staffer who works on cyber issues said he received a security briefing before making the trek down to Vegas. “You probably don’t want to access your corporate email over the DEF CON Wi-Fi.” “There is a criminal ecosystem out there,” said Marc Rogers, the conference’s head of security. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, CISA Director Jen Easterly and Acting National Cyber Director Kemba Walden are all in Las Vegas for DEF CON and Black Hat, its more corporate-friendly counterpart.īut the convention didn’t earn its reputation as “the world’s most hostile network” just because of what happens on the main stage. government officials, dozens of whom are in attendance this year. They’ve taken over the controls of cars, tricked ATMs to spew out cash and sent insulin pumps into overdrive, to name a few memorable hacks.įeats like that have turned the convention into an increasingly common pit stop for top U.S. Operating under the principle that the best way to secure computer code is to expose it, attendees have demonstrated some truly jaw-dropping research over the last three decades. Since the first-ever convention in 1993, DEF CON has brought some of the world’s most talented computer security wizards into the Las Vegas desert to scour software, hardware and networking equipment in search of vulnerabilities. Their personal information was, mercifully, partly blacked out for privacy reasons. As of Friday afternoon, there were at least 2,000 sheep at DEF CON, per the floor-to-ceiling projection. It included, for the first time ever, a live feed with the location of individuals who were leaking data. At this year’s conference, which wraps up Sunday, the Wall of Sheep was located in a dimly lit auditorium off the main conference floor.
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