14 DAY TRIAL // A lot of the DEFCON mystery has dissipated into thin air since the first conference took place. Back in 1993, holding a hacker's rendez-vous definitely led people into thinking that there was more to it than shown. But, since then, a lot has changed and the media always gets its way around the conferences, reporting with more or less subjectivity what is going on there (even DEFCON 1 had a reporter from InfoWorld).
At the beginning everybody thought that the meeting was all about nerdy looking youngsters gathering in one place and talking about all sorts of uninteresting stuff. And yet the number of the attendees grew each year and today the conference is one of the most important hacker gatherings on Earth.
Who Runs the Show
The founder of DEFCON is Jeff Moss, a.k.a The Dark Tangent, or should we say this the other way around (as hackers stick to their aliases and there are very rare the occasions when their name is divulged and the reasons are obvious as their activity is not quite legal all the time)? However, in the case of Jeff Moss this was inevitable considering the amplitude the event grew into.
Helped by his goons, Moss has reached to organize 14 DEFCON meetings in Las Vegas. The 15th edition of the event is scheduled this year and will be held at the Riviera, between August 3-5. The first conference held in 1993, between June 9-11, at the Sands Hotel and Casino (which has been blown up ? that means that no physical evidence of the meeting exists anymore), brought a very limited number of attendees. According to sources on the Internet there were around 150 hackers present at the conference and even if the phenomenon was incipient, some personalities of the day took the stand.
Among the speakers you could count Dan Farmer who then was the head of data security for Sun Microsystems, or Gail Thackeray, a U.S. Attorney from Arizona, who even gave counselling to the hackers not to commit any felonies in her presence as she would have been compelled to take all of them down.
As Robert X. Cringely reported after the meeting was over, the Sands Hotel and Casino was this close from being shut down by the attendees of the meeting. The reason? Quite simple. Many of them did not have the money to rent a room in the hotel, so The Dark Tangent rented the meeting room for all the three days of the meeting and it was used as sleeping room also. However, not all the hotel security was aware of this fact and when the shift changed the participants were kicked out of the room. You can imagine that revenge and retaliation was the common thought.
In just a couple of hours they managed to gain root level access to the minicomputer running Sands Casino and were ready to bring it down. A formal vote brought into the light the overall desire to shut the casino down. But, Gail Thackeray's voice of reason was louder and suppressed the activity (it is true that the aftermath described by the attorney involved a lot of feds looking for the retaliators). So the fed threat and the third strike for some of the hackers convinced the public to sit still and not engage in a battle with nasty repercussions.
The Talks
Hacking was the default hot topic at the event, but other matters were also discussed. Thus hacking UNIX was approached by some guys at Sun Microsystems and Dan Farmer talked about the future development of UNIX software. Other orators took the stand with subjects of very hot interest at the time (and they are still pretty hot nowadays, too) and viruses were also on the list (Mark Ludwig, famous virus researcher and creator held a session on Virus developments and Concerns).
More sensible subjects like Legal Implications of Complex Virtual Reality Systems were approached by competent talkers and with experience on the matter like Curtis Karnow, then a partner at a San Francisco law firm. He talked about the perception of virtual reality, the transition from single user to multi-user environment (the Internet was starting to bloom), the adjustment to the new realities and the zero user interface, once the adjustment to the new reality has been complete.
New resources provided by the technological progress were tackled by Dead Addict during a seminar, trying to uncover the changes of the new scene supplied by the Internet, Windows and networking.
To put it briefly, the speeches fielded security issues, viruses and the law. The bunch of 100+ hackers had a good time discussing the hottest subjects of the moment, sipped a lot of Jacks, played the now famous "Spot the Fed" and practically spent a lot of quality time in the company of their "siblings".
All the participants had the opportunity of talking freely about the most sensitive of the subjects and prove their talent in phreaking, hacking or cracking. And all this at a time when Kevin Mitnick had already been charged with several accusations and had been in the FBI eyesight for a while, not knowing that a long-term manhunt would follow. This is quite an accomplishment considering the times and the stress the hackers were under, wouldn't you say?
NOTE: Be sure to read the "23 Things I learned at DEF CON 1"
