Hi and welcome to Cyber Reasons Malicious Life, I'm Ren Levy.

So far in our B-side episodes we covered two major and well-known conferences thought-con and security B-sides. Now I think it's finally time to talk about the largest

and most famous conference of them all, Def Con?

Def Con is a hacker's convention established in 1993 by Jeff Moss.

From a very modest beginning of just 100 participants, Defcon grew to more than 30,000 attendees

who gather each year in Las Vegas to hear talks by experts, see interesting

demos and play games.

A lot of games.

Each year the best hackers from all over the world compete against each other in contests like scavenger hunts,

tech trivia, beard contest, and of course the now iconic

capture the flag competitions, car hacking, AI challenges, digital

forensics, and many, many more such events.

There are also villages, which are spaces dedicated to specific topics, such as the blockchain

village, biohacking village, ethics village, and more.

Just to give you a sense of the significance of what's going on in Defcon, the Voting Machine

Village, which was established in 2015 and allowed hackers to test the security of electronic voting machines, ended up publishing an award-winning

report and actually managed to raise national awareness to the vulnerabilities of these devices.

Jeff Moss, our guest in this episode, is an extraordinary person.

He is not only the founder of DevCon, but he also founded Black Hat, another very well known conference.

He's also an established security expert and a member of the US Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council.

Our producer, Eliad Kimch, spoke with Jeff about the origins of Defcon.

It's interesting relationship with law enforcement and some of the notable

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