Hi and welcome to Sabere reasons malicious life I'm Ren Levy If you should get a sense of how unusual Thadcon is among the other cybersecurity conferences

out there, you should probably start by visiting the website,

Thotcon.org. It's designed to look like a plain old terminal, black and white only, naturally.

It's partly written in Russian and Chinese,

and under the heading of location, it says top secret.

So yeah, thought-con is pretty unusual. In a previous malicious life B-side episode, we had Jack

Daniel from the B-Sides Conference, and in this episode we're continuing our tour of the most notable cyber security

conferences with Chicago's thought-com spelled THO-T-C-O-, which celebrates its 11th anniversary this year.

How did Thadcon come to be?

What makes it unique among the other conferences?

And what does it have to do with my favorite movie of all time, The Matrix?

Eliad Kimhi, our producer, spoke with Nick Percoco and Jonathan Tomek, two of ThoughtCon's founders.

Enjoy the episode.

All right, today we're talking to Nick Prokoco, aka C-75 and Jonathan Tomac, aka Sakibam.

And we're here to talk about thought con. For those of you listening, living in the Chicago area, you probably recognize

thought con as one of the biggest and oldest hacker cons in that area. It has a unique vibe and feel to it and it draws

thousands of people every year. So Nick, Jonathan, thank you so much for joining. Yeah, thanks for

having us. Our pleasure. Before we dive into thought-con, can you guys tell us a

little bit about yourself in a few words? Nick you can go first?

Sure, yeah, I'm Nick Prokoco. My day jobs have been in the security industry for coming up maybe on 25 years.

Today I'm the chief security officer at a cryptocurrency exchange known as Krakan and I run security

and engineering there.

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