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DEF CON 32
Date: August 8-11, 2024
Location: Las Vegas, USA
DEF CON 32 is the latest in the annual DEF CON Las Vegas conference series, seeking to once again bring both white hat hackers and security professionals into one room. Taking place in August 2024, DEF CON 32 will feature numerous presentations, panel discussions, and engaging activities — as well as the opportunity to relax and party with other members of the cybersecurity community.
Born from the underground
DEF CON got its start in 1993 as an impromptu hacker party organized by Jeff Moss. The original personal event soon grew into a full-blown hacker convention, attracting interest from outside the circle of Moss’s friends — and even beyond the borders of the USA.
Over the years, the convention transformed into a world-class conference on multiple cybersecurity topics. The change is reflected in DEF CON’s participation — while the initial attendees were exclusively part of the hacker underground (including such groups as Cyber Crime International, Hit Net, and Tired of Protection), DEF CON now also numbers penetration testers, cybersecurity researchers, and distinguished academics among its guests.
One tradition hasn’t changed over the years, however — DEF CON encourages participants to attend under a “handle” (an alias), keeping in the spirit of the hacker community’s desire for anonymity.
It takes a village to raise a hacker
Originally, DEF CON Las Vegas was a highly informal event that sought only to bring hackers together into the same space. As the hacker convention grew, however, it was split off into separate mini-conferences known as DEF CON Villages.
Each DEF CON Village focuses on a specific topic or activity, allowing people with shared interests to mingle and share ideas. Examples of popular villages include the Wireless Village, the Aerospace Village, the Car Hacking Village, the IoT Village, and the Capture The Flag Village. The experiments carried out in individual villages sometimes may gain wider media attention, such as the exposure of US voting system security issues in the Vote Hacking Village of 2018.