14 DAY TRIAL // What better location where you can have unrestricted fun than Sin City? There isn't a promiscuous thing you can't find there. So the same location as last year was elected by DefCon organizers. The hotel however was a different one.
1995's location for the conference was the Tropicana Hotel. A larger audience attended to this meeting (over 350 attendees were present) and the hottest topics were laid on the table and discussed. The speakers came from the most unexpected fields of activity. Both sides were present and shared their opinions on different subjects of interest.
And even a former CIA spy was present at the conference, speaking about the importance of companies securing their networks. Not for fear of the wrath of the hackers, but of the shareholders and those confronted with the leak of information. He actually admitted the important role hackers play in keeping the networks secure, referring to them as "major national resource". Now that's an open minded person!
One of the strongest arguments for the affirmation was that hackers are actually making the systems healthier. They are searching for vulnerabilities and gaps that the developer missed. After a breach, the security is reformed and enforced, making it harder to penetrate.
Elite cryptographers like Bruce Schneier spoke about cryptography, and digital authentication, importance of the encryption to be ubiquitous and protecting both classified and trivial data in order to be more effective.
Appealing to the more human (read "faulty") side of hacking, social engineering could not be skipped. Some tips in this regard were provided by a hacker in the flesh. Susan Thunder talked about the art of psychological subversion in order to learn information about passwords and generally sensitive data. The classic dumpster diving is also one way of learning all sort of info about what you are going to hack.
On the other side of the barricade of the hackers there was Steve Cobb that attempted to reveal to the audience why hacking is bad (talk about rope in a hanged man's house). Evidently, the audience was disturbed and some of them were even annoyed. Suffice to say that his speech was considered the worst event at the conference. I guess that was like explaining a person smoking for over 20 years that nicotine ingestion may cause cancer and that his life expectancy will shorten with each cigarette he smokes.
He said that "hacking should not be tolerated in any shape or form as it serves no useful purpose and is a menace to society". The way I see it, hackers simply exploit flaws in the system which are later remedied by those in charge. Ergo, hackers do a lot of good. Of course, when the purpose of hacking is stealing, then hacking turns into thieving and no good purpose can be detected in this activity.
Do I have to say that the attendees just had to have a little fun and did a little on the side of just listening to the speakers? Well, one event of this sort was cracking a hotel TV system and programming it to scroll "Hackers rule!" message on the screens of 1000 rooms. That must have been fun.
The same night they began broadcasting off the Tropicana roof by means of a pirate radio station. Besides these activities, the whiz kids present also played the now famous (for both hackers and authorities) "Spot the Fed", "Hacker Jeopardy" or the Red Box Building Contest.
Hacker Jeopardy's prizes included 25,000 units of money (currency was unknown), Phiber Optik's home address (that had to be worth something at the time), Erik Bloodaxe's blood samples and girls had a special one coming: tees three sizes too small for them. I wonder if they tried them on to be sure that they fitted in.
For those that could not attend the conference for various reasons, a dial in conference was set up. This way, anyone could participate by posing questions or giving answers over the phone.
All in all, there was A LOT of drinking (judging from Lynch's Adventures in Las Vegas) and generally everybody had a good time, no matter the endeavors they were involved in. Discussions on hot topics, a bit of hacking around and the contests available kept them all really busy during the three days event. Following the saying "A pictures speaks a thousand words" here's your chance to feast your eyes on images from the event in 1995.
