First time DEF CON Introduces Def Con Kids


 

 

           

This year Def Con 19 welcomed kids from ages 8 - 16 for the first time at the event held at the Rio hotel in Las Vegas this past weekend.  The event was held on August 4th - 7th and only $150 cash at the door to attend all four days.  A premiere partner is hackid.org.  Click on the link and check it out!  This is amazing news! A great opportunity for kids to look at their options.  There is so much talent and potential out there from young kids in this ever growing world of Technology.  So many people look at it the way they are told to look at it, but in reality Technology isn't good or evil, it's just how you use it or what you do with it. 

Def Con was started 19 years ago by a bunch of computer geniuses like us! Well maybe not all of us, but they were all just getting together to share and learn the latest tricks of the trade in computer hacking, lock picking, security breaching and more. All you do is pay $150 at the door to not give up your identity.  Today more and more the event grows into a great hacking community. Attendees come from various background in technology.  The aim in this was to better inform the insiders and people like you and me about the risks in our ever growing digital world. 

Everyone and anyone can attend this event.  There were Federal Agent there at Def Con kids talking to kids that its cool to be a good hacker and help fight crime.  But we all know that's not the only reason they were there (smiles).  Regardless the event is amazing! Here is part of an article I got from CNN where they interviewed Brian Markus which DEF CON veterans know to stray clear from.  So here it goes...

"Markus, for example, sits in a dark room in the Rio's conference center watching Internet traffic. When he sees a password fly across the connection, which is often, he posts part of it, along with the user's log-in name and the site he or she was using, on a large projection screen, which he calls the "Wall of Sheep."

Within an hour of watching for passwords on Friday morning, his team from Aries Security had racked up 10 half-shaded passwords. (The team, and others, can see the full passwords and usernames, but they choose to protect the victims by only displaying the first three characters of each password. Kind of them, huh?)" - CNN

There is no other place in the world where you are more likely to get hacked.  If you attend you will most likely be hacked.  But that is what is so cool about the event.  You get to learn these things and learn how to avoid them.

Many parents enjoyed bringing their kids to Def Con kids.  One parent whom is a security professional took his 14 year old son to Def Con for the first time and there his son attended events and contest in Social Engineering Capture the Flag (CTF) contest.  He also attended classroom sessions by Deviant, "When you can't remember your locker combination" and "Coding in Scratch" by Chris Hoff.

All the young attendees had to be accompanied by an adult.  Some of the most hottest competitions were geared toward the kids.  These included lock picking, finding weak points in popular software and computer hardware. "One accomplished hacker, a 10 year old who went by the name CyFi, discovered how to hack mobile games similar to Farmville on the Android and iOS platforms.  CyFi also presented her zero-day hack to 100 fellow hackers at DefCon.  The hack is termed zero-day because game developers are not yet aware their games are vulnerable in this way. CyFi also refused to name her targets to give them time to fix the problem before other hackers use the hack to speed up their own game play."- Washington Post,  Amazing right?! Yep' I agree too.

"In this spirit, Uncle Sam was out in force at DefCon. NASA, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security all advertised potential job opportunities for hackers who were seeking to get paid to defend the country from cyber attacks. The NSA, one of the government’s most secretive agencies, announced it would be hiring as many as 1,500 cyber experts before Sept. 30. At a time when the national unemployment rate is at just over 9 percent, for hackers, it’s a job-hunters paradise." - Washington Post