For U.S. officials, world’s largest hacking conference isn’t all fun and games

> “DEF CON is as much about security as Comic-Con is about comic books,” -- a goon

This is a rollicking good time to read, but probably not fun to try to go there and keep safe any electronic devices I might have with me. I attended a local Cybersecurity conference, small scale, but I kept my phone powered down at all times while I was in the vicinity of the venue. I got a really nice "fishbone" earphone caddy from PayPal.

So for me, at the beginning of my meteoric career, conferences were about hob-nobbing with cool hackers and seeing amazing stuff and maybe sitting in on a few talks that may be relevant. And unfortunately, I was unable to secure an expense account or a blessing from my supervisor to attend any conferences, so I basically went on my own and just hung out. The main one was a Usenix LISA that came to town, and there was a great BoF (Birds of a Feather) about Perl 3 upgrading to 4, and there were no hackable ARM badges, and more people had pagers than cell phones.

And yeah, I really did go to Comic-Con: the goal at that point was to grab as much free swag as possible. I would fill a bag in one day and bring it home like I was a trick-or-treater. I also liked to show off my goth attire and snag a few autographs.

I attended one conference with my employer in the late 90s, and for some reason I had volunteered my personal PC to be the demo machine, and it wasn't going to work anyway, but I had carted the whole mega-tower setup in my car and to the conference venue, and I felt like we didn't really get anything done at that conference, and it was probably my fault.

I think even if you show up to DefCon with no electronic device, you will probably be susceptible to social engineering. It may be safer to go in a group, and separate your roles, like a treasurer who holds the funds and a secretary who authorizes purchases or something. Or you could bring burner phones, a wad of cash, and just have some fun. It's Vegas, baby.

For the first 30 years of my computer career, approximately nothing the US federal government said about computers was useful. That first changed around 2018 with CISA. Panels with White house and CISA personnel at DEFCON are along the same line.