Hi and welcome to Sabir reasons malicious life. I'm Ran Levin. In the past few months we covered in our B-side episodes a number of cyber security conferences,

ThoughtCon, B-Sides, and Def-Con.

I think it's interesting to talk about conferences and explore the ideas behind them,

not only because they play such an important role in shaping and disseminating ideas and bringing people together, but also because each conference represents a different facet of the cybersecurity community.

For example, the B-Sides conference emphasizes openness and grassroots work.

ThoughtCon is all about hackers.

Defcon has its competitiveness.

Black Hat is more commercial in nature.

Each conference is like a window into a different room in that big house we call the cyber security industry.

If Durbicon, the focus of this episode was a room in that big house, it would probably be the

living room, because as Dave Kennedy, our guest today, puts it, Dbicon is all about making the community a family.

Debicon was founded in 2011 by Dave, Martin Boss, Alex Kay, and Adrian Crenshaw, and it was never about the money.

In fact, as you'll hear from Dave shortly, none of them ever made any money of the event. Another thing that makes Debicon unique among the

conferences we already covered in our podcast is that it is the only one of

them which is no longer active.

As you'll hear shortly, the reason why it is no longer active

has a lot to do with Debickon's emphasis on familiarity and community and not necessarily in a good way.

Dave Kennedy is one of the key figures in cybersecurity today.

He is known as a world-class expert on social engineering and created the social engineering

toolkit which is used by many organizations to

evaluate and improve their security posture in that aspect.

They've already appeared on our podcast before, but in this interview, however, we'll discover a few somewhat unknown sides of Dave's personality.

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