Contest & Event Status

• 10,000¢ Hacker Pyramid:
  Active
• Artwork Contest:
  Vote Here!
• Badge Hacking Contest:
  On like Donkey Kong
• Black & White Ball:
  Call for DJS, New Organizer
• Beverage Cooling Contraption Contest:
  Active
• Coffee Wars:
  10th Anniversary
• Capture the Flag:
  New Organizers!
• DefCon 101: A Lurkers Guide:
  Active
• DEFCON Bots:
  Unknown: Organizer change?
• DEFCON Shoot:
  Active
• Gringo Warrior:
  Active
• Forum Meet:
  Active
• Geo Challenge:
  Active
• Hacker Jeopardy:
  Confirmed
• Hardware Hacking Village:
  Active
• Lockpicking Contests:
  Active
• LockPicking Village:
  Active
• Mystery Challenge:
  Reg is Open!
• Open CTF:
  Active
• Podcaster's Meetup:
  Active
• QueerCon:
  Active
• Race to Zero:
  Unknown
• Scavenger Hunt:
  Active
• Spot the Fed:
  Always a go!
• Sushicon:
  Active
• Team Fortress 2 Competiton:
  Reg is Open
• Toxic BBQ:
  Active

The official DEFCON hashtag for Twitter at DEFCON 17 is #defcon. Use it whenever you tweet about DEFCON so we can see what folks are saying during the show!

That's right! The DEFCON 17 Schedule is now live! It may experience a few minor changes before all is said and done, but it is pretty much good to go! Events will be posted on the schedule page as exact times roll in, so keep your eyes peeled for updates! If you are a speaker and see any discrepancies, pass them along to talks at defcon dot org.

Go have a look, and while your at it, check out the last batch of awesome speakers we have lined up for you this year:

Preparing for Cyber War: Strategy and Force Posture in the Information-Centric World
Dmitri Alperovitch, Marcus Sachs, Phyllis Schneck and Ed Skoudis

Hello, My Name is /hostname/
Endgrain, Dan Kaminsky and Tiffany Rad

Dradis Framework - Sharing Information will get you Root
etd

0-day, gh0stnet and the Inside Story of the Adobe JBIG2 Vulnerability
Matt Richard and Steven Adair

Three Point Oh.
Johnny Long

Reverse Engineering By Crayon: Game Changing Hypervisor Based Malware Analysis and Visualization
Danny Quist and Lorie M. Liebrock

Cracking 400,000 Passwords, or How to Explain to Your Roommate why the Power Bill is a Little High
Matt Weir and Sudhir Aggarwal

Catching DNS Tunnels with AI
Jhind

Perspective of the DoD Chief Security Officer
Robert Lentz

Check out this big old list of hotness! There are only a few speakers yet to post, and the schedule is being webbified into a more mobile-friendly format (than past years) as we speak, so expect more updates in the next couple of days!

You may have already heard on Twitter, it is our pleasure to officially announce that Adam Savage of MythBusters fame will be speaking this year at DEFCON!

Wi-Fish Finder: Who Will Bite the Bait
MD Sohail Ahmad and Prabhash Dhyani

Your Mind: Legal Status, Rights and Securing Yourself
James "Myrcurial" Arlen and Tiffany Rad

A Low Cost Spying Quadrotor for Global security Applications Using Hacked Commercial Digital Camera
Laurent Beaudoin

Robot Shark Laser! What Hackerspaces Do
Beth, Eater, Noid and Nick Farr

Design and Implementation of a Quantum True Random Number Generator
Sean Boyce

Old Skool Brought Back: A 1964 Modem Demo
K.C. Budd "Phreakmonkey" and Taylor Banks "Dr Kaos"

Hadoop: Apache's Open Source Implementation of Google's MapReduce Framework
Joey Calca and Ryan Anguiano

AAPL- Automated Analog Telephone Logging
Da Beave and JFalcon

Who Invented the Proximity Card?
Michael L. Davis

Packing and the Friendly Skies (Why Transporting your Firearms may be the best way to Safeguard your Tech when you Fly)
Deviant Ollam

Opening up the Bureaucrats
Brenno De Winter

Runtime Kernel Patching on Mac OS X
Bosse Eriksson

Hacking the Apple TV and Where your Forensic Data Lives
Kevin Estis and Randy Robbins

Attacking Tor at the Application Layer
Gregory Fleischer

Hacking the Smart Grid
Tony Flick

Asymmetric Defense: How to Fight Off the NSA Red Team with Five People or Less
Efstratios L. Gavas

An Open JTAG Debugger
Travis Goodspeed

The Year In Computer Crime Cases
Jennifer Granick

Hardware Trojans: Infiltrating the Faraday Cage
Stephen 'afterburn' Janansky and Nick Waite

Attacks Against 2wire Routers -OR- Attacks Against Residential ADSL Routers in Mexico
Pedro "hkm" Joaquin

Stealing Profits from Stock Market Spammers or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Spam
Grant Jordan

The Day of the Updates
Itzik Kotler and Tomer Bitton

Air Traffic Control: Insecurity and ADS-B
Righter Kunkel

Picking Electronic Locks Using TCP Sequence Prediction
Ricky Lawshae

Jailbreaking and the Law of Reversing
Fred Von Lohmann and Jennifer Granick

Is your Iphone Pwned? Auditing, Attacking and Defending Mobile Devices
Kevin Mahaffey, John Hering and Anthony Lineberry

Hacking the Wiimote and Wii fit to help the Disabled
Josh Marks and Rob Rehrig

Subverting the World Of Warcraft API
Christopher Mooney and James Luedke

Slight of Mind: Magic and Social Engineering
Mike Murray and Tyler Reguly

Hack like the Movie Stars: A Big-Screen Multi-Touch Network
Cody Pollet and George Louthan

Smashing the Stack with Hydra: The Many Heads of Advanced Polymorphic Shellcode
Pratap Prabhu and Yingbo Song

TBD - Adam Savage of MythBusters
Adam Savage

Cloud Security in Map/Reduce
Jason Schlesinger

The Making of the second SQL injection Worm
Sumit Siddharth

Invisible Access: Electronic Access Control, Audit Trails and "High Security"
Marc Weber Tobias, Matt Fiddler and Tobias Bluzmanis

Metasploit goes Web
Efrain 'ET' Torres

USB Attacks: Fun with Plug & 0wn
Rafael Dominguez Vega

Cross Site Scripting Anonymous Browser 2.0
Jeff Yestrumskas and Matt Flick

Doppelganger: The Web's Evil Twin
Edward Zaborowski

Criminal Charges are not pursued: Hacking PKI
Mike Zusman

Here's what you do: go to the DEFCON 17 Artwork Contest Gallery on pics.defcon.org and pick your favorite. Then head on over here and vote in the poll!

The default display for the gallery is 12 items per page, so make sure you check out all 3 pages. There are 29 entries total.

Good Luck to all the fantastic entries!

Check out the new DJ pages on the DEFCON 17 site! You can find line-ups for the Black & White Balls, Pool Parties, and daytime Chillout area! There are also artist bios and samples of the music you might encounter! It's all at https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-17/dc-17-djs.html!

And don't forget to follow the DEFCON Twitter feed for news as it happens, leading up to and during DEFCON 17!

This year, we're packing even more goodness into Thursday's activities, with a half day of talks aimed at the DEFCON n00b. These talks will cover everything from basic hacking skills to what our beloved con is about, and how to get the most out of it. If you are new to DEFCON, or feel like you could get more out of it, this "basic training" will be an invaluable resource!

DEFCON 101
HighWiz, The Dark Tangent, Russr, DJ Jackalope, Deviant Ollam, Thorn, ThePrez98, LosT, Siviak

Pre-Con Introduction to Lock Picking
Alek Amrani

DEFCON 1 - A Personal Account
Dead Addict

Con Kung-Fu: Defending Yourself @ DEFCON
Rob "Padre" DeGulielmo

Hardware Black Magic - Building devices with FPGAs
Dr. Fouad Kiamilev

DCFluX in: The Man with the Soldering Gun
Matt Krick "DCFluX"

Effective Information Security Career Planning
Lee Kushner and Mike Murray

DC Network Session
Lockheed

So You Got Arrested in Vegas...
Jim Rennie

Hacking with GNURadio
Videoman

Yes folks, yet another batch of great talks has been posted on the speaker page! That should do it for this week, but stay tuned next week for the last batches of talks to go up!

Panel - Ask EFF: The Year in Digital Civil Liberties
Kurt Opsahl, Jennifer Granick, Kevin Bankston, Fred von Lohmann, Marcia Hofmann and Peter Eckersley

Panel - Meet the Feds 2009

The Middler 2.0: It's Not Just for Web Apps Anymore
Jay Beale and Justin Searle

Beckstrom's Law - A Model for Valuing Networks and Security
Rod Beckstrom

Sharepoint 2007 Knowledge Network Exposed
Digividual

Socially Owned in the Cloud
Digividual

Personal Survival Preparedness
Steve Dunker and Kristie Dunker

Social Zombies: Your Friends Want to Eat Your Brains
Tom Eston and Kevin Johnson

Cracking the Poor and the Rich: Discovering the Relationship Between Physical and Network Security
Damian Finol

FOE -- Feeding Controversial News to Censored Countries (Without Using Proxy Servers)
Sho Ho

Hardware Black Magic - Building devices with FPGAs
Dr. Fouad Kiamilev

Hack The Textbook
Jon R. Kibler and Mike Cooper

Advanced SQL Injection
Joseph McCray

Weaponizing the Web: New Attacks on User-generated Content
Shawn Moyer and Nathan Hamiel

Automated Malware Similarity Analysis
Daniel Raygoza

The Security Risks of Web 2.0
David Rook

Proxy Prank-o-Matic
Charlie Vedaa and "Anonymous secondary speaker"

Here are a few more talks to keep you going! We have a bunch more coming through the end of the week, so stay tuned. Follow the DEFCON Twitter Feed for announcements as they are posted!

BitTorrent Hacks
Michael Brooks and David Aslanian

Unfair Use - Speculations on the Future of Piracy
Dead Addict

DEFCON 1 - A Personal Account
Dead Addict

Con Kung-Fu:Defending Yourself @ DEFCON
Rob "Padre" DeGulielmo

Router Exploitation
FX

Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines
Barnaby Jack

Something about Network Security
Dan Kaminsky

Malware Freak Show
Nicholas J. Percoco and Jibran Ilyas

That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars
Jason Scott

Good Vibrations: Hacking Motion Sickness on the Cheap
Tottenkoph

From ddtek.biz:

Qualified teams:
1. sk3wlm4st3r (CONFIRMED! as sk3wl0fr00t)
2. Team Awesome (aka VedaGodz) (CONFIRMED!)
3. Sexy Pwndas (unconfirmed)
4. PLUS (unconfirmed)
5. Shellphish (CONFIRMED!)
6. Song of Freedom (CONFIRMED!)
7. lollerskaterz dropping from roflcopters (CONFIRMED!)
8. Underminers (unconfirmed)
9. Routards (CONFIRMED!)
10. WOWHACKER (CONFIRMED!)
alt. Sapheads_ (CONFIRMED!)
alt. sutegoma (CONFIRMED!)
alt. CLiP (unconfirmed)
alt. pebkac (unconfirmed)
alt. ACMEPharm (unconfirmed)

If you didn't make it and still want a mind bending challenge at DEFCON this year, there a few slots left in LosT's Mystery Challenge, so wrangle up a team and get to ten-five-seven.org to find clues on how to enter!

Open CTF will also be back this year, bigger and badder than ever if you need that attack/defend goodness!

Keep your eyes on the DEFCON 17 site for a page coming soon that will give you the lowdown on all the great DJ's that will spin at DEFCON this year. We'll have pics and bios, as well as sample tracks for download!

Also, due to the great number of awesome talks we're accepting in the 1200 second spotlight, we've decided to make a fifth track for turbo/breakout talks!

So keep watching for more updates, and as always, You can follow the DEFCON Twitter feed for links to the info as it's posted!

If you submitted a CFP and have not been notified of it's status hold tight! We have a lot of submissions this year that we want to accept. If you haven't heard back from us by now, you're still in consideration for a time slot. We're probably trying to find room for you. Sorry we missed our June 1st notification date, but we have too much awesome sauce for our burgers.

An update will be posted to the website when we have finished our selection process, all CFP's will be sent an email of their status at that point. Thanks!

In the past, we have usually opened up registration and swag midday Thursday for those early birds that want to get a jump on things before the con officially starts. There are also a few unofficial events and gatherings, like the Toxic BBQ and theSummit, that make Thursday almost an extra day of DEFCON.

This year, we're packing even more goodness into Thursday's activities, with a half day track of talks aimed at the DEFCON newb. These talks will cover everything from basic hacking skills to what our beloved con is about, and how to get the most out of it. If you are new to DEFCON, or feel like you could get more out of it, this "basic training" will be an invaluable resource!

In addition, the Chill Out Area will be open for hanging out and the infamous DEFCON wireless network will be up and running, so you can pwn or be pwned right out of the gate!

Stay tuned for a complete listing of all the great talks planned for Thursday, and as always, you can get instant updates as they occur by following the DEFCON Twitter feed!

Riviera Rooms: Be sure to book your room for this year's DEFCON! The Riviera is offering a DEFCON 17 special room rate of $89/night for 1-2 guests, add $20/night for guests 3-4. Hurry, space is limited, and our block usually sells out early!

New DJ Organizer: Welcome to DJ Great Scott, who has accepted the mantle of DJ organizer for DEFCON 17. He will be the overlord of the Black and White Balls and the Poolside DJ action! Get ahold of him on the Forums (greatscott) or at blackandwhitedjs@gmail.com if you want to spin!

Capture the Flag: CTF Quals Registration ends 6/4/09! Get your teams together and get in there! Register at: http://ddtek.biz/ctf/register.html

Artwork Contest: Only about 2 weeks left in the DEFCON 17 Artwork Contest! Make some hacker art and win fabulous prizes (like free entry to DEFCON 17 and swag!) Rules posted at:
https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-17/dc-17-artwork-contest.html

Contest & Events: Check out the Contests and Events section of the forums to see what's new! TommEE Pickles has resurrected the CannonBall Run, there's a new game called the 10,000 Cent Hacker Pyramid, and Coffee Wars is having it's 10th birthday! Extended hours at the pool mean Pool Party!

As always, follow the DEFCON Twitter for all the announcements as they occur!

Check out the DEFCON Tools page, a new section of the archives that collects the innovative tools released at DEFCON talks over the years! We currently have a list of the tools released at DEFCON 16, and are working backward to archive the tools from past shows. Special thanks to Mubix (aka Rob Fuller), of room362.com, for graciously collecting and writing up this content! All the tools Mubix could find are archived on the DEFCON media server. If you have access to a tool that is not locally stored, let us know at neil [at] defcon ]dot[ org and we'll get it up there!

Here's another great round of talks to get you excited for DEFCON 17!

DefCon 101
HighWiz, The Dark Tangent, Russr, DJ Jackalope, Deviant Ollam, Thorn, ThePrez98, Lost, Siviak

Session Donation
Alex Amrani

Sniff Keystrokes With Lasers/Voltmeters - Side Channel Attacks Using Optical Sampling Of Mechanical Energy And Power Line Leakage
Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco

Hijacking Web 2.0 Sites with SSLstrip--Hands-on Training
Sam Bowne

Attacking SMS. It's No Longer Your BFF
Brandon Dixon

Breaking the "Unbreakable" Oracle with Metasploit
Chris Gates and Mario Ceballos

Injectable Exploits: Two New Tools for Pwning Web Apps and Browsers
Kevin Johnson, Justin Searle and Frank DiMaggio

eXercise in Messaging and Presence Pwnage
Ava Latrope

Defcon Security Jam 2: The Fails Keep on Coming
David Mortman

Hacking Sleep: How to Build Your Very Own Sleep Lab
Ne0nRa1n and Keith Biddulph

RFID MythBusting
Chris Paget

Search And Seizure Explained - They Took My Laptop!
Tyler Pitchford, Esq.

Fragging Game Servers
Bruce Potter and Logan Lodge

Hackerspaces: The Legal Bases
RogueClown

Debaze - A Remote Method Enumeration Tool for Flex Servers
Jon Rose

Bluetooth, Smells Like Chicken.
Dominic Spill, Michael Ossmann and Mark Steward

"I Am Walking Through a City Made of Glass and I Have a Bag Full of Rocks" (Dispelling the Myths and Discussing the Facts of Global Cyber-Warfare)
Jayson Street

Dangerous Minds: The Art of Guerrilla Data Mining
Mark Ryan Del Moral Talabis

The CFP is now closed and selection is in full swing! Check out the latest batch of talks selected for DEFCON 17!

Unmasking You
Joshua "Jabra" Abraham and Robert "RSnake" Hansen

Confidence Game Theater
cough

Death of Anonymous Travel
Sherri Davidoff

Using Guided Missiles in Drive-Bys: Automatic browser fingerprinting and exploitation with Metasploit
Egypt

"Smart" Parking Meter Implementations, Globalism, and You (aka Meter Maids Eat Their Young)
Joe "Kingpin" Grand, Jake Appelbaum, and Chris Tarnovsky

The Psychology of Security Unusability
Peter Gutmann

Effective Information Security Career Planning
Lee Kushner and Mike Murray

Abusing Firefox Addons
Roberto Suggi Liverani and Nick Freeman

Clobbering the Cloud
Haroon Meer and Marco Slaviero

RAID Recovery: Recover your PORN by Sight and Sound
Scott Moulton

Protecting Against and Investigating Insider Threats (A methodical, multi-pronged approach to protecting your organization)
Antonio "Tony" Rucci

PLA Information Warfare Development Timeline and Nodal Analysis
Zulu Meet

Be sure to follow the DEFCON Twitter Feed for speaker updates and other announcements as they occur!

This is just a general reminder, we want to make sure all the submissions sent to us get a fair shot and are reviewed equally. We don't want any submissions missed so we send you an email to let you it arrived safely. You should receive an acknowledgment of your submission within 48 hours after you have submitted. If you have not received an email from us, please resend your submission to talks at defcon dot org.

That's right slackers, you now have until Monday, May 18th to turn in your DEFCON CFP Submission! We want your insightful research and groundbreaking discoveries to make it to the DEFCON 17 Stage!

So get on it, what are you doing reading this? Go work on your submission!

You can read the submission rules and get the CFP form on the DEFCON 17 CFP page.

Here are a few more of the talks chosen for DEFCON 17 to whet your appetite:

Why Tor is Slow, and What We're Doing About It
Roger Dingledine

Managed Code Rootkits - Hooking into Runtime Environments
Erez Metula

Maximum CTF: Getting the Most Out of Capture the Flag
Psifertex

Hacking, Biohacking, and the Future of Humanity
Richard Thieme

As always, we will be posting these talks as they are chosen, so keep your eyes on the speakers page! Better yet, follow the DEFCON Twitter Feed for up to the minute notification of new talks, and all of the announcements relating to DEFCON 17!

The much loved and anticipated LosT@Con Mystery Challenge has a new home on the web at https://ten-five-seven.org! LosT informs us that team registration for this year's challenge will be opening soon, so keep your eyes peeled on the new site, and on the Mystery Challenge Forum on the DEFCON Forums for all the details on how to enter and for clues relating to the challenge!

It's that time again, art ninjas!

Whip out your favorite medium and get to creating, because the official DEFCON 17 Artwork Contest is now underway, and will run now to June 15, 2009.

The goal for this year's artwork contest is to create a piece of art you would see plastered on a wall, mailbox, telephone pole or bumper of a car of the nearest urban center. What we're looking for is an underground feel, reminiscent of DIY 'zines, gig posters, or pulp comics... (Read on)

Speaker selection is underway, here are a few more of the chosen talks! Expect more early to mid next week!

Win at Reversing: Tracing and Sandboxing through Inline Hooking
Nick Harbour

Computer and Internet Security Law - A Year in Review 2008 - 2009
Robert Clark

Making Fun of Your Malware
Michael Ligh & Matthew Richard

De Gustibus, or Hacking your Tastebuds
Sandy Clark "Mouse"

Hacking UFOlogy 102: The Implications of UFOs for Life, the Universe, and Everything
Richard Thieme

For all of the latest updates as they occur, be sure to follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/_defcon_

The first round of speakers have been chosen with another to follow soon! You can check them out on the DEFCON 17 site, which is now live and will contain all the info for this year's con!

From Deviant Ollam in the DEFCON Forums:

The Gringo Warrior section of my web site has been pretty bare for a long time. I didn't even have a link to it on the main page. Well, that's all changed now. All the past content, the scores, the videos, the summaries, etc etc etc. is all online now.

http://deviating.net/lockpicking/gringo

So, if you participated in a run of Gringo that was filmed, check it out and show your friends! If your attempt was filmed by someone other than me, point me towards a video of it online and i'm happy to link to it. If we somehow accidentally filmed you when you did not want to be filmed, please let me know so i can pull the video down.

I'm looking forward to bringing this back again at DEFCON 17 and have been really happy to take more and more steps towards buffing up the overall appearance and reputation of the game in order to ensure that it is included among the "Official Events" with a Black Badge this year. That was the plan last time, but a miscommunication fouled us up in the end.

I hope to see all of you stopping by the Gringo area this summer, if not to participate then at least to cheer on (or heckle) your friends.

1 APRIL 2009

DEFCON CTF QUALIFIER ANNOUNCED

Defense Diutinus Technologies Corp (ddtek) is pleased to announce the round of qualification for DEFON 17 CTF.

The competition will be held on 5-7 June - without a stop, participants can be located everywhere. All are to play, but only the 9 best groups will be invited to join us in Las Vegas for the annual DEFCON ninja square off. We also intend to honour the code of the former CTF host and automatically qualify last years champion, the sk3wl of r00t (although we sincerely hope them to participate in qualifications).

The qualification round will be in the style of game board, but answers need not be in the form of a question. Categories will require teams to demonstrate the superiority of hacking into a vast relm of security.

You must be registered for participate.

Registration site: http://ddtek.biz/ctf/register.html
Registration opens: 01.04.2009 00:00:00 UTC
Registration ends: 04.06.2009 00:00:00 UTC

Qualifications open: 05.06.2009 23:00:00 UTC
Qualifications ends: 07.06.2009 23:00:00 UTC


More information that will follow via your registered email address.

Bring all your l33t haxor skillz just leave your Kiddie toolz behind.

Vulc@n
Difensiva Senior Engineer
Diuntinus Defense Technologies, Inc.

DEFCON's very own Russ Rogers was interviewed on CNN about the con and the motivations behind the Conficker Worm. Check it out!

Check out the new format for the DEFCON Archives! DC15 and DC16 have been converted, and the rest are being ported over as we speak!

The new format combines links to Presentations in audio & video, Media RSS feeds, Conference Programs, Press from the show, and more in to one easy page for each past DEFCON.

DEFCON 16 Archive
DEFCON 15 Archive

Check 'em out!

The DEFCON website has been given a fresh new face, designed to deliver relevant content, inspire interaction within the community, and be more mobile friendly. We've released this beta to get feedback from you, the user, as we begin to flesh out the new features. Take a look around, on different browsers and devices, and if you like, report any bugs or voice suggestions to neil [at] defcon ]dot[ org.

We're adding a few new items to the site, restructuring and expanding the archives section, and highlighting community news and events. Keep your eyes on the DEFCON RSS, Forums, Twitter, and/or LinkedIn Group for announcements as these features are completed and implemented.

DEFCON 2009 CTF is officialy underway! The newly chosen organizers of this year's CTF competition, Diutinus Defense Technologies, Inc., have broken their silence on the DEFCON Forums. You can view the post at https://forum.defcon.org/showthread.php?t=10246&page=3. They have also posted a website at http://www.ddtek.biz. Check it out!

The fine authors of Proposal #1 on the DEFCON 17 CTF Submissions Thread. We are not at liberty to divulge much more than this at this time, but you can read DT's announcement and keep yor eyes peeled for new details at the submissions thread link above.

It's going to be another great year of events and contests at DEFCON, the ideas are flying and some new players have emerged. A couple of new items for this year are DefCon 101: A Lurkers Guide to DefCon, and the DEFCON Geo Challenge. You can check out all of the latest contest and event info on the DEFCON 17 Official and Unofficial Events and Contests Forum.

From HighWiz on the DEFCON Blogs:

The original "Unofficial DefCon FAQ" wasn't the work of one single individual but a collaboration by many people. I view my role as more of an organizer of the information rather than the creator of it.

Version 1.0 is seriously outdated, http://defcon.stotan.org/faq/ and in need of a refresh. So I figured I'd utilize this blog space to request feedback on version 2.0 . (Read on...)