- Welcome to the DEF CON 30 Homecoming 101 Track.
(audience cheering and applauding)
So it is been like a very emotional year.
How many people at the beginning of the year
weren't sure if we were even gonna be here?
A show of hands?
Right, it's really questionable.
Month after month, and the stress,
and so being here and seeing my people is really awesome.
So you're awesome,
just thought I'd say that.
(audience applauding)
So for those of you who have not really been to a DEF CON,
or maybe only a DEF CON virtual,
and now this is your first...
First timers, raise your hand.
No shame.
Holy shit.
(laughs)
- That's amazing.
- Oh well, I mean it makes sense,
you'd all be in this room at this time.
So that works.
Okay so you won't get too many of the older references,
but that's fine.
I'll just kind of talk for about 10 or 15 minutes,
and then we're gonna pass off to Melanie
who runs our communications and press
and is sort of the consciousness of the CON.
- Don't put that on me.
- I don't put that...
I lean on Mel for a lot of advice,
and then we're gonna have this great panel
with some new and longtime DEF CON goons and attendees.
And then, we're gonna go to the audience
and ask some question and answer your questions.
So before we do that,
there's a couple of cliche phrases around DEF CON
I just wanna address.
One is DEF CON is what you make of it
and this came about when a lot of people were complaining,
"Hey, I didn't get this one specific experience
that I wanted,
or I didn't meet this one person
that I knew I was supposed to meet if I came,
or I didn't get to hack the car or whatever."
And other people would say,
"No, well I got to do that.
Why I didn't you get to do that?"
It quickly turned into there's a million ways
to experience this conference
and unlike some other more corporate conferences,
we don't have these pathways totally defined for you.
It's not like you get on the track one,
shake the hand with the executive.
and get the sales briefing.
It's really up to you
and it can be very chaotic at sometimes
which causes some stress,
but it's also super rewarding
because it's like a choose your own adventure.
We're in this unlimited massive multiplayer universe here
and everybody has had to go through
what you are gonna go through this year,
trying to figure it out.
Some people's focus on the talks.
Some people sit down with their laptop.
Some people sit in Lock Picking Village for half a day
and walk away with a new skill.
And so, don't feel that you missed out
'cause it's impossible.
Around DEF CON, I think three,
I started hearing stories of stuff
that were happening at the CON
but I was throwing that I didn't know was happening.
And then, I realized this is bigger than me
and I have to be okay with not knowing everything
that's going on.
That's kind of like...
If you have children, that's kind of letting go.
Please tell me the stories.
Please send me the pictures of her first steps or whatever,
because I'm not there.
I missed it but I'm still there,
and that's what you're gonna hear at DEF CON a lot,
"Oh my God,
did you see the cabanas flying through the air last night
when the storm hit?
Did you see the water raining in on the roof last night?"
I guess what I'm getting at is
I want you to go make your own path
and I want you to not feel bad
if you didn't see everything.
So that's sort of the it is what you make of it.
If you're very introverted,
maybe take an attempt to maybe extrovert,
but if you can't that's okay
because probably a third of DEF CON is super introverted.
When we built the CON unintentionally,
I'll take credit for it
but really it's an unintentional action,
is we grew by word of mouth.
We don't have a marketing budget.
And so every year, based on people's experiences,
they'd tell their friends and it grew very organically.
And so, there's no attempt to target a market audience
and get that market audience to attend.
It is what it is through just organic word of mouth.
I think that's one of our greatest strengths
because the people are here generally want to be here.
We didn't mind trick them with some Facebook targeted ads
or something,
and because that people are pretty passionate
about what they're into
or what they want to try to get out of it.
So that's just kind of how we got there,
how we got here.
In the early days, and even today, we never...
I come from the bulletin board days
and USENET days after that,
and you never knew the gender
of the person you were talking to.
You didn't know their age.
You didn't know where they were from.
You didn't know anything about them,
except what you saw in their messages at 300 baud,
at 1200 baud, 2,400 baud.
And so, we would make your decisions on
if the person was an idiot or not based on what they said
and that just carried forward.
We don't give a shit what you look like
or what you sound like or anything.
We are interested in what's in your brain.
You should be judged here on your ideas,
and your compassion, and how you interact with other people
and not what kind of shoes you're wearing.
And so that might be important elsewhere,
but here you'll see these people in suits,
talking with these teenagers with green hair
and they're having a great time
and it's really kind of a surreal experience
and it's awesome.
So please try to just suspend your eyes
and focus on your experience when you talk to people.
We have had,
you'll hear some things about Spot the Fed contest.
We have had a rocky history a little bit with the feds,
but it's always been tongue in cheek
and I'll tell you a brief story about how that got started.
We were organizing,
DEF CON was the first not invite-only hacking conference,
30 years ago.
Before, you had to know someone to get in,
to get the invite, to get on the list,
to show up the hacking thing
and I didn't like that
'cause I didn't get invites to some of them.
It's like fuck that I'm making my own show.
But when we made our own show, I was like,
well I don't want that experience to happen to other people.
So we invited everybody
and it wasn't just hackers or phone freakers,
we invited artists and musicians and lawyers.
Basically in those days,
there was this whole Renaissance sort of pre-wired.
The internet could be anything.
It could be art.
It could be this utopia.
And so, everybody was invited
and everybody was trying to figure it out.
And so, I had this really eclectic early mix
and actually a friend I made at the very first DEF CON
was a lawyer for Capitol Records.
That summer I was working as an intern
at Capitol Records in Hollywood
'cause of this connection I made.
And so it was a really nice blending,
well I knew the feds were gonna be there.
Law enforcement in movies were kind of promoting this image
of the hacker as this mythical person that could fly
and walk through walls and hack computers.
I send a fax to the FBI field office here and I say,
"Hey, I'm Jeff Moss.
We're doing this hacking conference.
You're invited."
It just kind of goes into this black hole
and I sent them to the secret service
and I was trying to blanket everything
so nobody's surprised at the last minute
if they hear that there's a hacking conference in Vegas.
Well, the show's getting closer and closer
and I'm starting to get nervous.
And so, I call the field office in Vegas and I say,
"Hey Jeff Moss, I'm doing this hacking conference."
They say,
"Okay, let me transfer you to the special agent in charge."
He answers the phone,
"Special agent in charge, blah, blah, blah."
And I go into my spiel,
"Hey, we're doing this hacking conference.
I'd love to have you there.
We're gonna have all these hackers.
We're gonna do this, it would be great."
There's this big, long pregnant pause on the phone
like I can feel eyes lasering me through the phone.
And he says, "We are aware of your activities."
(audience laughing)
And I'm like, "Oh great, so you're coming?
So that sounds that's good right?"
He laughs 'cause he knew he was messing with me
and he's like, "No, no we're enforcement
and what you want is policy.
That's Washington, DC.
That's not a field office.
You should talk to them."
Okay, no problem.
First DEF CON comes and goes, shenanigans happen.
It's over.
It's Sunday where cleaning up
and guy comes over to me
and he like shows me his badge.
He's like, "Hey, yeah good show."
I'm like, "You said, you were not coming."
And he is like, "Well, you know."
And it's like, "Okay, we can do this.
We're looking for you next year."
It turned into this sort of cat and mouse game.
In the early days, if they wore leather loafers,
you knew they were feds.
Then they got sneakers on.
They got smarter.
The fanny packs with the firearms disappeared
and they got better and better.
The long story short though
is that created this kind of more accepting
interactive experience,
and that Spot the Fed game unintentionally
really paved the way I think
for no animosity between us.
Our communities kind of game recognizes game a little bit.
And so, all these unplanned experience
have led us to this point,
this crazy blending of different communities.
And so, when people think that there is a master plan...
No man, there's no master plan.
The master plan is community and getting people together
and giving them as many pathways
to make connections as possible.
When you have this many people,
you'll notice this and this is intentional.
When you get this many people, a conference,
it is impossible to not feel lost.
So what do we do?
We fork you off.
Interested in aviation?
You wanna go in aviation?
You wanna go ICS part of aviation.
You want to go...
And next thing you know,
you're sitting at a table with 10 other people
with your interest and you're talking to them
and now you don't have to deal with a thousand people.
You just made 10 friends, right?
You're in the lock picking.
You're in the high security lock picking.
You're in the thing.
Now you've got 10 people around you.
And so we are constantly thinking,
how do we split everybody off
into smaller areas of interest
and then let you decide where you wanna go.
So it does feel big,
but it's also conferences inside the conference,
inside the conference.
We're constantly trying to figure out how to do that
and one of our famous strategies
is I give you a lot of rope.
If you want to run, say the AI Village and you say,
"I've got this idea for an AI Village."
It's like, "Okay convince me.
Okay, you get a space.
Let's see if you fuck it up.
If you don't, you get more space."
And so when you go in there
and you see a really large village,
it's like they didn't screw it up for years.
(audience laughing)
If you see a small village,
a lot of times their first timer or they're just starting.
They're trying to figure it out.
So your feedback to them could be really valuable
because they're just trying to figure out
how do they find their way in this community.
You'll see villages come and go.
It didn't work out, or the time was wrong,
or there's a lot of interest in blockchain
and then the interest drops
and we repurpose the space to try the next idea.
And so again, not a master plan really.
We are just trying to get you all to talk and connect
and carry on that DEF CON spirit throughout the year.
Because you'll find out that the friends
and the relationships you make here,
you'll carry throughout the rest of the year.
We do some virtual events.
We have a Discord.
We have forums,
but really man nothing beats this in person feeling.
So try to get the most out of that.
One final thing is the one thing we don't do
is we don't take sponsorships
and that's a conscious decision.
There's probably a lot of money
we've been leaving over on the table over the years.
But when we started the conference,
there were no sponsorships.
Nobody was doing this.
And so by the time money arrived in the hacking scene
and sponsors arrived,
we'd already built ourselves to be self-sufficient.
So we really didn't need it
and we didn't want to be influenced by it.
And so if sometimes you look around you're like,
"Man, they should just put an extra video wall there.
They should do this extra thing."
It's like,
"We could if we started taking sponsorships
and generate a lot more revenue
but we don't want to."
That's a pretty intentional decision
because we like our freedom
and we like the ability to tell vendors
or people who might try to intimidate us
to not have a talk on an access control system
or a voting system.
We like not being able to be pressured
through different vendors.
So that's also a little bit of the CON history
that you might not,
might be in the back of your head
but that is a conscious decision.
Okay, so that's my opening orientation remarks.
All I do the whole CON is I walk
and I just orbit and orbit
and that's all I do the whole time.
And so if you see me, say hi.
I'm happy to talk to you,
but if it looks like my hair's on fire
and I'm racing somewhere just get outta my way.
(audience laughing)
Please.
(audience laughing)
Okay, so I'm gonna hand it off.
Where did Mel go?
Oh, there you are.
Okay, so I'm gonna introduce you to Melanie
who's gonna introduce you to our panelists
and we're gonna go...
They're gonna carry on the conversation
and it's gonna open up to the audience.
So great.
Thank you everyone.
(audience applauding)
- All right.
Thanks Jeff.
A bit of course, correction.
I go by Wednesday.
- [Jeff] Wednesday.
- For strangers, so. (laughs)
- [Jeff] You're all strangers.
- And you're all strangers.
Alright, so thank you so much everybody
for joining us today.
I'm really excited about the folks
that we've pulled together today.
They all have very different
and unique experiences with DEF CON.
So I've asked them to share a little bit of their story
and how they got involved in the community
to help all of you as you acclimate,
and find your people,
and find your little groups within this very large group.
I am the type that I am very introverted
and I just pretend to be an extrovert for a living.
So if you also feel that way,
there are plenty of corners,
plenty of wonderful people,
and we wanna help you find the folks
that you really gel with.
If you are an extrovert,
I don't understand where you come from
but there's also a place for you here.
So that being said,
a little bit of background about myself.
As Jeff mentioned, I run the press department,
the communication strategy here at DEF CON.
I have been a goon for nine years.
So I have seen a lot of the changes that he talked about
and I actually started by volunteering
with what at the time was called DEF CON Kids.
So we used to have a village
dedicated to our youngest hackers.
It eventually evolved into something called Rootz Asylum.
They have since retired as of this year,
but hopefully we will have something taking its place
for next year.
So if that's something that's interesting to you,
let me know
because we are trying to pull something new together.
But that's how I got started,
it was just volunteering with one of these villages
and over time there was more needs
and more things that the team needed help with.
Eventually, I hope nobody actually holds me responsible
for the consciousness of DEF CON,
but it is part of my professional training
to help organizations be a little bit more empathetic
and more inclusive.
So with that being said,
I wanna introduce our amazing panelists
that we've brought together today.
I'm gonna ask each of you to introduce yourselves.
Let us know what you want to be called.
I know all of you by different names
and I wanna be respectful
of what you want to be called by this group.
So let us know what you want to be called.
Let us know how you got introduced into DEF CON
and give us one tip of a do or don't
that you would share with a newcomer
who's here for the first time.
So let's start with you.
- My name is Tennisha Donna Hill.
I prefer to be called T.
I got introduced into DEF CON through BlackGirlsHack.
This is our first year here.
We have a village called Girls Hack village.
So, yeah.
- Do you have a tip for the newcomers
on something that you would recommend they do
or they don't do?
- Plan for the things that you can't plan.
Just keep thinking about all the what ifs and keep planning.
- Hello, my name is Shannon Morris.
I go by Snubs on the internet.
My pronouns are she and her
and I got introduced to DEF CON back in,
I wanna say like 2009 through a YouTube podcast
I do called HAK Five, H-A-K Five.
You can Google it.
It's really good.
Definitely subscribe.
Like and subscribe, thanks.
I guess my main thing would be,
please dear God wear deodorant.
(audience laughing)
(panelist applauding)
- Is this on?
Applause out the gate.
Hello, my name is Steven.
I go by @AsifoSays on social stuff there.
I was introduced to Jeff by some individuals on my team
who had been before,
and then we were having a recruiting event.
So I came and I was like, "Oh, this is cool."
One piece of advice that I would say or I guess to do
is whatever remotely interests you go check it out
especially if it's your first time.
There might be something that you weren't expecting.
And it's like, "Hey, this is actually pretty cool."
For me was the social engineering community
where they were calling I was like,
"That's pretty cool."
- My name is Michael also known as Sparky.
It's he/him.
I started DEF CON 8.
DEF CON 10, I was brought into the knock
and 20 years later I'm sitting on stage.
I guess the one tip I have is look to your left,
look to your right,
these are your people
and take a chance
and talk to them.
You might not kick off a conversation with them,
but the reality is you might
and from there you might end up
in a half dozen other conversations
and it is the three days outta the year
where you're gonna have an opportunity to do that.
Don't miss out on that chance.
- Awesome, thank you.
I wanna add my own tip
which I'm also sharing on behalf of DEF CON.
Do not fuck with the hotel or the casinos.
I'm being serious.
- Yep.
- It is very difficult to find a venue
that will put up with our shenanigans.
Please don't make it harder for us
to host DEF CON in future years.
Okay?
Do not fuck with our hotels or the casinos
that have opened their doors
to let our community come in and be together.
So that's my tip.
So one of the things,
and Jeff touched on this a bit as well,
but one of the things that I think is so important
and is different about DEF CON
compared to what we might consider
to be a professional info sec conference.
There's an example down the road.
It's that DEF CON isn't just a transaction of,
"Hey, we went to this conference and did this thing."
But DEF CON really is a community above and beyond
what is gonna happen over the next three days this week.
And so, I wanna ask our panelists here
to talk a little bit about what did you do to engage
in the community outside of the three days
that we have together every year?
What is some advice that you would share with everybody
in terms of how to make DEF CON
more than just a transactional event?
- That's a really good question.
- I don't think her mic is on.
- Is her mic on? - Yeah, her mic.
- Sorry, can we have somebody else while we try to...
- No, alright.
- We'll get back.
Is it on now?
- Yes. - Okay.
- That's a really good question.
Thanks for making me first.
(Melanie and Michael laughing)
Connecting with people,
join organization,
for me personally, I'll speak from my experience.
I joined BlackGirlsHack.
I'm the director of policy over there.
It was easy for me to connect and grow,
even though we all live across the country
with people in the cyberspace
and that develops relationships
where some of these people are not my friends.
I can call on them.
I have mentors.
I have different people, if something happens at work,
I can lean on.
So for me, it's continuous,
continually connecting and share with other people.
- The first year I came here to DEF CON was back in 2009
and it was overwhelming
and I'll be very transparent with you.
I have crazy imposter syndrome
and being around so many smart people
made me feel like I didn't know enough to be here.
So when I came home from DEF CON
and I started doing shows on YouTube,
I decided to really delve into things
and start educating myself.
The way that I tried to become a part of the community
was by introducing tutorials on things
that I was truly, really interested in.
I like Wireshark series and stuff like that.
By learning those things myself
and by delving into it like a noob
and completely just telling people,
"Hey, I'm a noob too. It's okay.
It's okay to learn all these things and educate yourself.
That's totally fine."
I learned coming back the next year
that everybody else is more than happy
to share their knowledge
and that was the biggest thing
that I brought home from DEF CON,
after going a couple of years,
was that people are more than willing
and more than happy to teach you new concepts,
teach you new techniques about information security,
and privacy, hacking in general.
There's so much more that you can learn
when you are willing to get yourself out there
and kind of combat your own imposter syndrome
and just tell people,
"Hey, I don't know how this works.
Can you tell me like I'm five years old?"
By doing that,
I really, really felt like a part of this community.
And through the years,
it's become strong and stronger to the point
where I came back this year after being gone for two years.
I got ambushed by a few friends in the hallway
and I started bawling my eyes out
'cause I was so happy to see them.
It truly it does turn into a family
once you find your people here.
I think it really just takes getting outta your shell
and just being willing to talk to people.
- For me, this is my second DEF CON.
The first one I went to was like right before the pandemic.
When the first one,
I probably just knew people on my team
or I'd worked with directly before.
Since then,
the way that I've probably had the most interaction
with people in this community is at my local conferences
or just other conferences that I travel to
'cause I imagine you guys
probably go to other conferences there.
And then, also people that have funny memes on Twitter.
That's my tribe.
And so now when I come back around here,
I might bump it to people
or maybe just through Twitter and say,
"Hey, are you gonna be around?"
And then, just catching up with people that way
and that's helped me a lot.
I feel like I know a lot more people now.
- So for me, when I started coming to DEF CON,
I was actually the station manager
for the world's largest online punk rock station.
I had bought a computer a year before that
and I was like computers got that.
And so, I showed up at DEF CON
and I totally rocked the imposter syndrome,
sat down at the table,
and had my head completely blown
to the point where it was a little panicky too
'cause you're like,
"Oh shit, I'm way out of my element."
After that,
I attempted to try to get a press pass
and was roadblocked year after year.
So I eventually found another methodology.
- Not by me, not by me.
(Michael laughing)
- No, no, not by Mel.
But yeah, I found a different way of doing it.
I made friends and started talking with those people
and handed out cheesy business cards
and an unfortunate event happened
and they needed somebody to step in
and help out with DCT.
I was sitting at the Alexis Park
and my two coworkers walk past me and I'm like,
"What are you guys doing here?"
And they're like,
"Oh, somebody reached out to us and asked us to set up DCT.
And I was like,
"Seriously, I handle the business cards
and they get the goon badge."
So I made a stink and invited myself into their team
and next thing you know I was hanging APs
and the rest is kind of a history.
For me at home, I don't longer live in a large city.
I live in a small town.
I live in a small town that has been transitioning
from being in mill town or an industrial town
into being a new or trying to reinvent itself.
This small town,
they don't embrace technology.
It is very hands off for them,
but I'm opening a Makerspace
and I'm getting the community to try to learn
about the maker community.
From there, start to bridge that gap
and start to introduce technology
and start to introduce a new mindset to them.
So that's the part I try to give back to the community.
- Awesome.
I loved all those ideas and I love all your stories.
The other thing that I will add is that
if you aren't really sure where to start
and you haven't quite found your group of folks yet,
there is an organization called the Lonely Hacker Club.
So if you wanna look them up and connect with them,
they do a really good job of helping people
like matching them with folks who share interests
in helping you locate certain corners within DEF CON
and within the community where you can meet new folks.
So that's a good resource
if you're looking for some additional support.
So that being said,
I wanna give folks time to ask questions
so you can pick the brains
of these really smart people up here.
We do have roaming mics.
So if you have a question that you'd like to ask,
just raise your hand
and the goons will be bringing the mic to you.
- Yes.
- I'm just gonna say this to start off with.
My expertise is an administrative and operational.
So if you're gonna ask me a question about the knock
and where the pixies go,
I'll do my best
but most likely I'll just give you my Twitter handle
and I will get you an answer later.
- I see a hand back there.
- Raise your hand really high
so we can see if you have a question.
- I see one there.
- We can get a mic to you.
- Where are the mics?
- Oh, make 'em run.
Make him run.
- I see a mic person running.
- There you go.
- Run, run Sir. Run.
- [Attendee 1] Thank you. - Yes.
- Hi.
Oh, wow.
I appreciate you,
I appreciate you asking everyone
not to fuck with the casinos and the hotels.
How about each other?
The reputation is that,
you enter a DEF CON wifi and it's toxic
and why is that okay if that's true?
And if it's not true, please dispel.
- I just wanna make sure I understood the question.
So tell me if I'm getting this wrong.
The question is why is there not a rule
about not fucking with each other
in terms of the wifi network
and everyone's connected devices?
Did I get it?
Okay.
It's a very good question.
I don't have a 100% definitive answer for you,
but I'm gonna tell you the way that we're thinking about it
is this is a hacker conference.
We expect people to hack on things.
We're also very mindful of the fact
that members of our community fall along
a very long moral spectrum
in terms of what is considered ethical hacking
and what is kind of everybody's comfort
and boundary with that.
We have to be realistic about that
because we have anonymous attendance.
I don't actually know who is in this room.
That's on purpose.
We don't want governments and other agencies
to be able to come and get it an attendee list from us.
So there is a little bit,
I think of self-awareness
of what kind of environment we're in
from a security perspective while we're here.
And so, we do try to provide advice
on how to protect yourself, how to protect your networks.
We advise you don't bring your corporate devices here.
But at the same time
I wanna also acknowledge the fact that in 2022,
if you don't feel safe using technology
within the DEF CON space,
I think we also need to be talking about
how safe our normal everyday networks are.
So there's a lot of advice about don't bring smartphones,
don't use wifi, don't use all of this,
when you come to DEF CON
and people are putting all their devices in fair days.
If you are a high risk high target individual
where you know nation states are targeting you,
I think that's all applicable advice.
But for most of us,
the types of things that I do to protect myself
when I'm in DEF CON are the things I do every single day
because those threats exist even when the hackers go home.
So I don't know if that's a satisfactory answer for you,
but that's at least the way
that we've been thinking about it in terms of DEF CON.
We hope that everybody is respectful of each other,
but this is also a hacker conference
and we want people to be able to learn
and develop new skills
and to be able to find vulnerability
so that they can ultimately be fixed
but we can't enforce that that's what people do
with the knowledge that they gain.
- I don't know if I could add a little bit extra.
Mel is a hundred percent correct, but we do offer...
So we have DEF CON Open.
It is the wild west and a great experience
if you have not tried it yet.
And then, we have DEF CON,
which you formally known as DEF CON Secure
and there's tons of information available
at wifiregdefcon.org.
I definitely recommend you visit there.
And then, the question about the casino floor.
Yeah.
I mean part of my French but don't shit in the pool.
It is...
They don't mess around.
That's a crime.
It is a crime to attack a company, a person, anything right?
They don't look at it as you being experimenting
or there is no three day free pass in Las Vegas.
You step outta line and they will respond
with their full force
and they brought extra force for this weekend.
So yeah...
You got a sandbox, go build castles,
tear down castles.
Do it in this environment.
Everybody's gonna leave happy.
- You are the best bad cop to my good cop.
Thank you for adding that.
Any other questions from the audience? Yep.
- [Attendee 2] Hey.
So most conferences I go to,
I leave with a bag full of stuff.
Come here, everyone tells me I'm at the wrong place.
So I'm just wondering,
is there a place to get free swag anywhere here?
- Yes. - Yeah.
- Snub should take that one.
- Oh my gosh.
Go to the sticker swap.
You can get so many stickers.
I have a friend who literally throws
little rubber ducks at people,
over and over again.
I had a friend last night
that gave me a little action figure for his company.
You can find stuff all over the place.
People are handing out swag.
- [Attendee 2] Would you introduce me to your friend
'cause I like action figures?
- I mean like...
Okay Carl, we can go find 'em.
Full disclosure,
I am volunteering at the HAK Five booth.
But straight up with a purchase,
we're giving out free battery packs.
You can find stuff all over the place.
So yeah, definitely.
Go to the sticker swap, I'm gonna be there.
I'll give you some stickers.
- We're having a networking event tonight.
If you come to our networking event,
you will have swag bags for you.
- [Attendee 2] Oh damn, I know where I'm going.
- Is that at the Girls Hack Village?
- Girls Hack Village
and in the Flamingo, Virginia City III.
Sorry, it's very long.
So you guys come there.
We're also having a nineties party tomorrow
here in the Caesars Forum.
So, everyone is welcome.
So we'll have swag.
So just come visit us,
a small little promo.
- Awesome.
But the reason you won't get a DEF CON swag bag
when you register is, as Jeff mentioned,
we don't have corporate sponsors.
And so, that swag is either gonna come from the vendors
who are sponsoring individual villages
or from attendees who are being very generous
in sharing things with the community.
I think one thing to note
that I think a lot of first time attendees may not know
is that DEF CON operates a little bit
like a platform where we provide the space
for people to create villages,
but the villages run their own content and programming
which means that they may have sponsors
but that sponsor only sponsors that room
and their relationship is with the village not with DEF CON.
So you may find swag at different parts of conference
and parts of DEF CON,
but we don't have just one single DEF CON swag bag
because DEF CON does not accept corporate sponsors.
- Yeah, we'll clap that.
That is good.
That's a good thing.
(audience applauding)
- Great explanation.
- I think we had a question over here.
- [Attendee 3] Sorry if I stutter,
but how would someone go about getting into hacking?
This is coming from knowledge on basic networking and stuff,
but how would someone teenager or hell even adult
go into hacking at all?
- You gotta Makerspace in your community?
Sorry I'm like shameless plug for Makerspace but yeah,
you got a Makerspace in your community?
You gotta hacker space?
That's a great place to start
because you're gonna get direct feedback from people
and people will engage with you.
- There are also local DEF CON groups
and a lot of cities all over the world.
So that would be my first place where I would start
was I would look up online
whether or not there was a DEF CON group in my city.
If not, then I would look at a hacker space.
There are a lot of even just hacker collectives
that exist in a lot of cities.
So at least from my experience,
having somebody in my town
that I can meet with in meet space
is where I would start and what I would recommend.
But even for kids, there's a lot of free resources online.
Just be really, again as Sparky was saying earlier,
be really careful about the environments
that we're teaching people in
because we don't wanna see kids
accidentally end up in legal trouble
because they unknowingly crossed a line.
So look for those resources online
that are giving you a safe environment
rather than having the kids just hack all over the internet
'cause we need those skills.
We need that talent.
We don't wanna lose them to the legal process.
- There's one back there.
- I think the goon has a question.
- After this one, we have time for one more,
so the one in the back will be the last one.
- [Attendee 4] Yes,
so mainly I'm a backend software engineer.
I mainly write APIs and ghosts.
So I'm not exactly a hacker,
but what would be a suggestion that you give to me
to gain some expertise from the great people here
so that what it is I write
is not riddled with vulnerabilities?
Any particular places I should go?
- I just wanna note that we found the unicorn,
a developer who doesn't wanna write insecure code.
(audience applauding and cheering)
- There you go.
- Any advice from our panelists?
- There's definitely,
probably some interesting stuff
for you in Blue Team Village.
I don't know what it is you work in.
There's also the Cloud Village as well
which could have some interesting stuff for you.
- I'll be speaking at the Blue Team Village this afternoon,
so come.
We have different things going on
in our village as well too
so you can come there as well.
You are welcome.
- The other place I'll recommend is the AppSec Village.
So they do a lot of stuff around pen testing,
software quality testing and all of that.
So that's another good place
to meet other software developers who care about security.
- I'll probably definitely plus one the AppSec Village.
You're already two thirds of the way there.
I mean the fact that you will stand up publicly
and say that you do not want to write insecure code
is the right step forward.
I can't tell you how many dev meetings I'm in,
where they're like, "Nah, we'll take care of it afterwards."
- Nope.
- All right, last one in the back.
- [Attendee 4] Yes.
I'm here attending the conference with my wife.
My wife is not here for DEF CON though.
I only have the pass for me.
Are there any events or meetups
or anything of that nature where we can attend together?
- That is a good question
that I truthfully don't know the answer to,
but if you will come find me after this
and we can exchange contact info so I can find out
and I'll let you know.
I'll also have the DEF CON Twitter handle tweet out
whatever I find out.
So if other folks are interested in that information,
watch the DEF CON Twitter handle and we'll get that out.
But that is a great question, thank you for asking that.
- That actually brings up a great message
that I would love to share.
One year I brought my husband,
I got him a badge and he loved it and he's in HR.
He's not a hacker, but he loved it.
He went in the Lock Picking Village
and he sat down for an hour
and he came out and he was just like,
"I know how to pick locks."
I was so proud of him.
I was so proud.
And then I was like,
"Don't tell your boss 'cause you're HR.
You probably shouldn't know how to do that."
Bring people who are not hackers to the convention
and share the wealth of knowledge
because oftentimes you can find a village
that they will absolutely love.
- Oh yeah. - Yeah.
For sure,
I brought my wife once to DEF CON
and nine months later my son was born.
So there are other events.
- Congratulations.
- We happily named him Flynn too.
- So yeah, what village was that?
- It's invite only.
(panelist laughing)
No, there's tons of stuff to do with your significant other
and that's the beauty of it.
We are a community,
as Jeff said earlier,
of artists and lock pickers and phone freaks
and there's just so many different things.
There's always something to find.
If you're really, really having a hard time,
just go see a fantastic singer.
Right, there you go.
Go see a fantastic performer. - A lot here.
- Yeah, yeah.
- So, are you saying DEF CON changes lives?
- Oh damn.
(panelist laughing)
- I didn't laugh.
- Okay, changed your life.
- I haven't brought him.
I am hoping for roots
or sorry the new version of it.
I personally believe that DEF CON
may have to sponsor my child to attend,
concerns there.
- Awesome.
Well that's all the time that we have for today.
How about a round of applause for our panelists?
(audience applauding)
So thank you so much everybody
for starting your DEF CON 30 with us here today
and welcome to DEF CON.
(panelist cheering)
- Welcome to DEFCON, half the planet.