Meet The Hackers — Part 1 — The Ultimate Social Learning Experience

Ben Caunt
Ben Caunt
Aug 8, 2017 · 4 min read

Hopped on a plane to LAX, with a dream and a cardigan. Well not really but I am a closet Miley fan and that has been the song I listen to when landing in America every time I have landed. This time I was destined for Las Vegas, Nevada for the hacking conference ‘Defcon’ — This year being the 25th Anniversary.

Now some background, I’m not an overly technical person, I can’t code (yet) but I can usually pick up on technical concepts fairly easily. My partner who is an information security professional was attending both Defcon and the Black Hat conferences on behalf of work and I thought, why not join in and see what you can learn! Black Hat is the corporate infosec conference whilst Defcon is the more grassroots conference with around 20,000–25,000 attendees. The program is packed with talks, villages, contests and of course social events, all surrounding the concept of hacking. Hacking has a bad name, you usually think of someone in a dark trying to steal your credit card details however when in reality it is really just the idea of using something for a purpose other than what it was intended and as I learnt hacking comes in so many different formats. I am hoping to write some more musings on what I learnt and experienced but lets get started at the start.

What I think was the most interesting part of this whole conference was that it had organically grown so big after starting with just 100 people in 1993 to now they take over most of Caesars Palace for 4 days in July/August every year with thousands of attendees. Moreover this has become a year round community with long term research and progress coming from people meeting at Defcon. The most common question I heard from other attendees was asking whether it was your first Con or not and then them telling you about how they have attended for however many number of years and their experience was always different. This sense of community is something I had never really seen before, the amount of information sharing, collaboration and learning going on should be the envy of any corporate.

There were people presenting their research in formal keynote presentations to large audiences where people were hanging on every word and the presentations recorded for future digestion.

Each Village consisted of a central theme (hacking voting machines, hacking cars, social engineering among others) and these all came with their own feeling of community. In a single room you could see people showing off their latest work through presentations, diverse groups of people making suggestions about how to solve a specific problem or even competing against each other to see who could contribute the most towards reaching an end goal.

There were challenges at both a con level and a village level with the ever coveted Black Badge available to winners. A fairly literal implementation of gamification if there ever was one!

But despite these more formal learning opportunities available to attendees most people who had been more than once or twice lamented at the chance it presented to meet people and connect. Suddenly job titles didn’t matter and human to human connections about reaching goals, learning new things and solving problems became the highlight of the whole experience. Seeing this in action made me realise that the whole con was just like an organisation. It had many different moving parts and people with different priorities but it really came down to human to human connections and to learn from other people.

An example of this was someone who I met who had recently finished college and was working in network administration and monitoring. Something he felt was a great basis for working in the industry but definitely only a starting point. But where to next? The previous year he was talking to someone in the Social Engineering village and it was those conversations that got him interested in the discipline. That guidance and conversation through a genuine human to human connection started a thirst for knowledge. He was then able to go back to his employer and present what he learnt and start looking at opportunities to work in that part of the business.

This is just one example of what I am sure is many throughout Defcon but the question I want to pose is how can a business create the same environment where people make those genuine connections with each other and learn something new. How can that spur people to get thirsty and seek out other information and learning opportunities?

This is the first in a series about my visit to Defcon — Stay Tuned for more soon!

Ben Caunt

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Ben Caunt

Driving change, innovation and learning through the combination of people, technology and creativity to deliver business value.