This year marks my 5th year at DEF CON. Well one year, was during COVID and I lived out my hacker fantasies in my basement. I’ve found there are three people in the world
- People who have never heard of DEF CON
- People who have heard of DEF CON and are afraid of the hackers
- People who have heard of DEF CON and are the hackers.
The first group of people ask, “What is DEF CON?” My explanation, is that it is a bunch of people who think similar to me. They are curious. They want to know how things work. Sometimes they like to play with the rules of a system to make it do different things.
The second group of people have visible shocked or scared reactions. This group is concerned about the hackers. They believe that hackers are scary, hackers will steal your data and break into you computer, even if it’s off. At BlackHat 2021, I stopped by a booth and talked with a young sales rep. He asked what I was doing the rest of the week and when I told him DEF CON. He got quiet and whispered, “You don’t hang out with those people do you?” I said, “Sure, they are smart people and many of them are in this room.” The look of shock on his face was priceless.
The final group of people are people like me. They are curious. They may or may not love big CONs. However, they aren’t scared of DEF CON. They know the WiFi is secure, because they’ve set up secure WiFi or they know they can trust someone. They understand that there are risks to life and have various mitigations in their normal life. Every person at DEF CON has their own threat model and each person has to make decisions based upon that. It might be bringing a burner phone OR updating your phone the weekend before.