My First Def Con experience

I have been asked a few times about my first Defcon experience, so thought I would create a blog post to help others too (and to remember my time by.)

So what is Def Con? Def Con is a Hacker Conference in Vegas - This is the 32nd Def Con (#DEFCON32) which comes at the end of Hacker Summer Camp which includes BlackHat and BSides Las Vegas. I only attended Def Con, but next year I hope to get out to BSides Las Vegas too. Black Hat has always been considered the more corporate conference, but I heard of a few issues of misogyny this year from vendors and with women which has put me off attending. Misogyny has no place in this industry! I didn't experience or hear of any issues at DefCon.

First of all, I have to thank the amazing ?? Glenn Pegden for putting together a fantastic newbie resource. This was Glenn's 3rd DEF CON. There were about 20 of us who went out from the UK, with lots of us as Defcon Newbies, so we set up a Discord channel in the BSides Leeds , and a Whatsapp once in Vegas. I went out Wednesday - Sunday / early Monday morning, which was a good amount of time in Vegas - Next year I plan to stay a bit longer so I have some recovery time. Other big up to Graeme Moss and Adam Horden who were also part of the Linq Crew!

Glenn is infamous in Vegas it seems, as the first person we met at the Linq Bar was Jack Rhysider of Darknet Diaries fame, who said Hello to Glenn. With Jack selfies are shoe selfies - I chose the right sparkly shoes!

People also remembered Glenn at the Linq Bar from LineCon last year - We knew we had come to Vegas with the right person! We went to the HackerOne Vegas Mixer, in Area 15 which was a really cool Gaming type place. Then having been awake for an ungodly amount of time kicked in.

On Thursday we experienced #LineCon and were there for 6 am queues. Registration opens at 8am, and we completed LineCon and Merch by 1130. The Defcon Badge was cool with a Pacman Emulator inside, which also worked to the programme and told you which talks were happening in which rooms if you set the time. I have yet to complete many of the challenges, but it was a cool distractor for the queues! You can also customise the lights - I am told it's not a digital badge every year so I think we started on the right year!

As we left queues were massive so we definitely did the right thing! I met Jeff Owen in LineCon and we bumped into each other a few times, including dragging him along to our UK mixer and going to the Jack Rhysider party. Defcon really is friendly - Everyone is happy to chat and to swop stickers or swag. The PocketSIEM deoderants (giving you 24/7 coverage) really went down well! I also shared Dracoeye stickers, and the team have told me that there has been a spike in US and Canada users so hopefully this was related!

Next up we went across to Mandalay Bay, as I wanted to meet up with Chris Roberts . Chris was unable to fly out this year to BSides Lancashire but joined remotely, so I wanted to give him his BSides Flat Cap (as well as lots of hugs and Yorkshire tea.) Chris invited us to the World Wide Technology lunchtime venue and told us about his new role - It sounds like a perfect match and I got to meet some of Chris's colleagues including Katherine Kuehn fresh off her opening BlackHat AI Keynote.

Thursday evening we attended the Microsoft Security Response Center event at the Skyfall Lounge as a guest of Katie Paxton-Fear It was attended by Marcus Hutchings, MalwareJake, Tib3rius and so many more amazing people - It was an insane party! Thank you to Ken Nichols and Mohamed Magdy AbuMuslim who told us about their cool work at Microsoft as well as the different community events they get involved in!

Friday was the first full conference day - First up for me was the cDc / Veilid mixer with Katelyn Bowden

Next was a trip to the 2600 stand, where I met Emmanuel Goldstein (the founder of 2600) as well as Kyle from Off the Wall & Off the Hook 2600 radio show. I run the revived version of the Manchester 2600 which meets the first Friday of every month as a community meet. I will be raffling off one of the signed books at our 1st anniversary in November for charity (TBC which charity)

Next was a trip around the villages - Game Hacking, Password Cracking where I caught up with Will Hunt and Yiannis Chrysanthou then off to the Aerospace village to catch up with Matthew Gaffney and Ken Munro

I had another fan girl moment when I met ??Jayson E. Street?? - It was his 20th Def Con and he had badges from each of the villages to gift to a Def Con Newbie. I was gifted the Next Gen Badge, which was apt as I was on a panel on that stage the next day! I was also given a Def Con 3D-printed ring - Thank you for adding to my swag haul and for being so welcoming with your time.

Saturday I watched my first talk, Hacker History with r00t, Emmanuel Goldstein, Deth Veggie, Patrick Kroupa,Tommy DCat and John Threat - This was a really great panel to open the conference. I purposely didn't watch many talks as they do tend to be recorded.

I then went to the soldering village to learn how to solder my badge from Jayson - which was pretty tricky with nails on but I managed (with help)

Then it was panel time - I was on a panel discussion at the Next Gen Village, inspiring children, on behalf of The Hacking Games alongside Samantha Swift as host, Eva Benn Katelyn Bowden Stephanie Calabrese and ??Heidi W There were lots of great questions from the kids, so hopefully we left them inspired that Hacking is for everyone - I even got called a hacker by Katelyn so I am now using that title too!

Finally we organised our UK / Open to all meetup at The Fireside Lounge, which saw about 20 of us meet up to socialise.

Then back over to Def Con for the Jack Rhysider party - everyone dressed as Jack, and he handed over access to his Twitter feed for a couple of hours to create mayhem!

Sunday was our return day - After an epic Denny's breakfast, we headed to the airport, only to meet Fredrik ST?K Alexandersson in the airport bar. Stok gave us a personal rendition of his BlackHat Main stage talk on BitSquatting and his new Certainly tool - a fantastic way to end out the Def Con experience.

A massive thank you to th4ts3cur1ty.company for sending me to Def Con as part of my personal development - This is a great company that really believes in community.If you are interested in working for us, check out the roles on our website

And if you are looking for new cyber security suppliers, or want to hear about what we do, then drop me a message to chat. I need to fund the next Hacker Summer Camp now I have the DefCon bug!