It has been a dream of mine for 20 years to one day attend DEF CON, and it has finally happened.

It was an amazing experience — way larger than I had imagined. What I love most is seeing passionate, like-minded people gather in one spot and show off beautiful things and projects they care about. The scale is massive: it occupied all three levels of the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, with many villages, talk areas, merch booths, vendors, party/chillout areas, and more. At any one time, there were probably 15 talks and 30 activities happening simultaneously — it was truly overwhelming. Just look at the schedule.

I was looking forward to collecting my DEF CON badge, having prepaid my ticket online a month earlier to ensure I would get one. Unlike most conferences, the preferred registration method here is to register at the venue itself with cash — but there’s always the risk that the actual badge sells out, leaving you with a paper badge instead. I was a little disappointed to find out that this year’s badge was non-electronic — DEF CON only does electronic badges every other year. Naturally, hackers are more excited about the electronic ones, so they get all the buzz. I wasn’t aware of the alternating-year tradition.

To give you an idea of how massive it is: the merch line stretched longer than the entire length of West Hall. I queued for 4 hours just to get a bunch of tees. The villages were amazing: lockpicking, car hacking (they had an actual Rivian in the hall), biohacking, game hacking, tamper-evident, and many more that aren’t even on the list. Many offered beginner-friendly hands-on activities. Multiple capture-the-flag (CTF) competitions were also running at the same time.

Plus: I got to meet Jack Rhysider of Darknet Diaries from one of my most favorite podcasts!

The talks were impressive. I attended quite a few. Some of the highlights for me were:

• The One Bitcoin Heist – Joseph “stoppingcart” Gabay
• Inside Look at a Chinese Operational Relay Network – mtu & earl
• Cash, Drugs and Guns: Why Your Safes Aren’t Safe – Mark Omo & James Rowley
• DisguiseDelimit: Exploiting Synology NAS – Ryan Emmons
• Where’s My Crypto, Dude? The Ultimate Guide to Crypto Money Laundering (and How to Track It) – fr0gger_
• Man-in-the-Malware: Intercepting Adversarial Communications – polygonben
• Ghosts of REvil (on Kaseya Ransomware) – Jon Dimaggio & John Fokker
• “We Are Currently Clean on OPSEC”: The Signalgate Saga – Micah Lee

Look out for these talks when they are released soon.

Overall, it was an amazing experience. Childhood (20yo still counts, right?) dream come true. Thanks to my wife for taking over kid duty alone for the week and encouraging me to go.

Side Note: Vegas Loop

Elon Musk’s Boring Company’s Vegas Loop is… lame. A glorified, inefficient, eco-unfriendly “subway” system. I took it every day to avoid walking under the brutal Vegas summer heat — 43°C (110°F) — but it could have been a monorail.

Not only is it non-autonomous, it requires far more human workers than I’ve ever seen in such a short transit system: drivers, ticket conductors (tickets are checked manually and queues are manually assigned), signal operators (tunnels are single-lane, and flow is controlled manually with gantries and traffic lights), and human traffic signalers (some junctions had people manually controlling the flow).

The cars were rather slow too, going at 20-30 mph, and had to wait for signals due to the single-lane tunnels. There was even an accident because one of the drivers ran an in-tunnel red light: Vegas Loop Accident. This is four years after it opened in June 2021!