It’s been a crazy busy week, and I’m going to have to hit the easy button for this one. I’ll return to my series on protecting your home network next time. Instead, I’ll give you a little taste of what I saw at “hacker summer camp” 2023. I attended both BSides Las Vegas and DEF CON (but didn’t pony up the big bucks to attend BlackHat).
After interviewing Luke (Deth Veggie) and Misha (Omega) from the Cult of the Dead Cow on my podcast last week, I got to meet them and many other members of cDc including Kevin (Grandmaster Ratte) and Christian (Dildog). They were extremely warm and welcoming to this outsider, for which I am eternally grateful.
The cDc also unveiled a new security-focused distributed platform for censorship-resistant communications called Veilid. I asked Dildog to come on the podcast sometime to discuss it – we’ll see if that comes to pass.
I hung out a bit with Cory Doctorow at the EFF Tech Trivia contest (our team won last year, but we couldn’t get everyone together again this year). I checked in with the Hack-A-Sat team where they actually held a Capture the Flag hacker competition on an orbiting satellite! (I’ve interviewed them three times now.) I spoke with Harri Hursti briefly at the Voting Village, where they look for vulnerabilities in voting machines. I also briefly met ex-CISA director Chris Krebs there, while attending a panel discussion he led. (I’d love to interview him some day.)
That’s a very quick overview of my trip. I’ll be talking more about it on this week’s podcast (which will be delayed at least a day).
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