DEFCON Behind the Scene

Jeff Moss took the audience on a behind-the-scenes look at cybersecurity policy and practice, starting from the origins of DEFCON, and continuing on to present day Washington, DC policy-making as ICANN’s chief security officer. Two decades ago, when the first DEFCON was taking shape, part of the goal was to get as many computer security-focused individuals in one place in order to encourage the open exchange of knowledge, at a time when there were no better ways to do so. To that end, DEFCON was the first open hacker conference, eschewing the invitation-only model of similar contemporary events. And, it turned out, not only security professionals and hackers were (and still are) interested in this kind of knowledge exchange, but governments were as well: intelligence and counter-intelligence agents have been spotted at DEFCON from the very early days and continue to appear year after year.