Viva La Defcon!

Defcon 16 was awesome! I'd like to congratulate Dark Tangent and all the Defcon goons for such an awesome event.

This year somehow I managed to meet more people, attend more parties and see more presentations than during previous years. I had the pleasure to meet other fellow researchers for the first time such as Nathan McFeters, Billy (BK) Rios, RSnake, id and many others! All of them are security warriors whose research I was familiar with, but had never met in person. It's always nice to put a face to a name!

Although meeting the aforementioned individuals was of course a pleasure as I enjoyed having a nice chat with all of them, perhaps the most special and unexpected encounter was running into Captain Crunch!

In short, while chilling at the freak show party, I saw an elderly gentleman who appeared to be having a great time at the dance floor. This gentleman called my attention as he appeared to never run out of energy despite his active dancing activity. Eventually, I started noticing his resemblance with Captain Crunch. So I told my wife: _you know, it's funny, but there is this man on the dance floor who looks a lot like a big icon from the early history of hacking: captain crunch_. My wife was familiar with such legend of the hacker culture thanks to having seen The Secret History of Hacking and kind of agreed with me regarding his resemblance with Captain Crunch.

To me it was kind of surreal to find Captain Crunch raving at a Defcon party. Eventually I approached him and said: excuse me, have you ever been told that you look like Captain Crunch?. And he goes like: "I am Captain Crunch!" Amazing, I guess anything is possible at Defcon!

Also, I got to hangout with several friends including pdp which is great. Regarding presentations, I saw quite a few, some more relevant to my profession as a pentester than others. My favorites were Time-Based Blind SQL Injection using heavy queries, Sniffing Cable Modems and The World of Pager Sniffing. All of them really fun talks!

Finally, I really enjoyed the showing of the original Wargames movie for its 25th anniversary. Not only is Wargames one of my favorite (and perhaps more accurate) hacker movies, but David Scott Lewis - a.k.a. Lightman - was there himself to answer questions made by DT and anyone in the audience. For those who don't know who David Scott Lewis is, he was the model for Matthew Broderick's character in the movie Wargames.

PS: excuse my sleepy face in the picture!