black hat usa conference vs defcon conference

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If you talked to the hackers last year it was like, “Of course you can do that. The security researchers knew that of course that’s what the NSA or any government can do. Nothing changed before or after Snowden’s revelations. We feel like we’re trying to take our own future into our hands. I think that’s a much more healthy response. Everybody’s responding in their own way, so this year it feels much more hopeful. You see Google and Microsoft investing money to create foundations to audit software. IETF has decided that pervasive Internet surveillance is a threat and needs to be taken into account for all future Internet protocols. Hackers like Josh Corman trying to make a contribution to make things more secure. Now we’ve had a year, and you can see what the reaction has been: more energy than ever from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the. Last year, it was just this sense that offense was so totally overwhelming, defense is helpless, what are we going to do, woe is me, the sky is falling. We understand what’s going on due to the revelations.” It was like, “My God, what are you going to tell us next?” Now it’s like, “Ok, we understand the threat now. Last year, there was sort of this sense of impending doom. I think the cult of personality around Snowden has been replaced by concerns about what he revealed. Where does he fit into the zeitgeist of this community? The last Defcon happened just after National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden was first granted temporary asylum in Russia. Now everybody’s hacking the phones and intercepting phone calls and SMS messages, and nobody trusts their phone thanks to Snowden and all, and they want to use our secured Wi-Fi. It used to be you wouldn’t use our secured network because nobody really trusted it, they’d use their phone.

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Sometimes people don’t know how to deal with that. You’re judged on what you know and what you can do, so it’s really kind of a put up or shut up culture, and you’re judged on what’s in your head, not how you look or what kind of watch you own. The nefariousness is really more of an irreverence. I think there’s a little bit of nefariousness. This conference has a nefarious reputation.

#Black hat usa conference vs defcon conference password#

Using the Wi-Fi is highly discouraged by some, for good reason: One room is home to an electronic bulletin board called the “Wall of Sheep,” which lists the user ID and partial password of any hapless hacking victim at the conference.ĭo you have a Dorian Gray painting somewhere?

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The place is rumored to be teeming with cybercriminals and federal agents alike, plus hordes of hackers trying to crack each other’s systems. The light-up electronic badge needed to get into the conference can only be purchased with cash, and organizers collect no information about attendees’ identity. The weekend is a celebration of hackish whimsy, the right to privacy and radical freedom of expression. It’s an event that some feel pushes the boundaries of legality, as hackers teach one another skills from lock picking and password cracking to evading government surveillance. It’s one of the biggest hacker conferences on Earth, with about 15,000 attendees this year. For one weekend every year, thousands of the world’s best-or worst, depending on your point of view-hackers meet in Las Vegas, Nevada, for Defcon.