Hacker Summer Camp Brings the Magic Back

Over the first two weeks of August in Las Vegas, when BlackHat, DefCon, and BSides Vegas all happen back to back, most of the industry shows up for the run, or some piece of the run, or whatever their calendar allows.

And yes, I know "hacker" sounds like a word you're supposed to be scared of. It's been doing a lot of unfair work in headlines for decades. But the people filling these rooms aren't the ones you need to worry about. They're the ones finding the problems before the people who should worry about you get the chance to.

One of my favorite things to do every year, once the conferences wrap, is go back and watch the talks. You can find the Black Hat talks here, and the Def Con ones here (the BSides ones aren't up yet, but give it a few weeks).

This? Is where the magic happens.

I do not understand all of these talks. I suspect no one does. There are so many specialty areas that it's highly likely three quarters of any given talk is incomprehensible to anyone outside that niche.

But if you let your eyes go a little soft and stop needing to catch every word, there are some genuinely amazing, inspiring, intriguing talks in the mix. Zoom out far enough and you start to get a real sense of where cybersecurity is heading, what threats are coming down the pipe, and who's actually doing the work to stop them. That's where a lot of the ideas for this newsletter (and for our courses) come from.

Case in point: BSidesLV has a talk from eight months ago about securing American water processing plants. Timely, hey? It's a fabulous talk, and genuinely important information if you want to actually understand the water plant hack stories making the rounds right now (instead of just doom-scrolling past them).

Most consumers of technology have bought in (literally, this is a facet of capitalism) to the idea that tech exists for our greater good, our convenience, our health. The hackers presenting at these conferences are the ones pulling back the curtain to show you the man isn't actually a wizard. They cut past the marketing and the PR spin to hand you the data you need to figure out which tech is actually working for you, and which one isn't.

There's no way I can keep up with the torrent (see what I did there?) of ideas, findings, and dots being connected across the industry. I lean on this huge, mostly anonymous group of people I've never met, and likely never will, to help me understand what the rest of us need to know.

Recognizing (and knowing how to navigate) the line between technology and humanity should honestly be taught the way media literacy is. You should be able to spot propaganda and tell it apart from fact. You should understand how technology-for-profit has quietly replaced technology-for-advancement. And most of all, you need to stop treating tech as a consumer good and start treating it like a tool, the kind that gets maintained and handed down, not the kind that gets thrown out.

But if you're living the Sandwich Generation life, you have exactly zero time for any of that. So this is part of what we're here for: a subscription to the way my brain pulls all of this together, so you don't have to.

Especially at Black Hat (I mean, just look at the name), you see presentations about people hacking purely for the love of hacking. Some of it is amazing, sometimes mind-blowingly clever, purely for its own sake. But you also see people going public with exploits because they've run out of other ways to get an industry's attention. Eleven years ago, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek couldn't get the auto industry to take remote hacking of automobiles seriously, so they took it to the Black Hat stage instead. Watching those talks (still live on the Black Hat YouTube channel, linked above) is what first told me there was a very real threat that nobody else was talking about.

Straight up: hacking was being used to keep us safer.

What's genuinely fabulous about the work coming out of these conferences is that these are people pointing their genius at human empowerment, not shareholder value. Their gift is seeing the error nobody else caught and thinking sideways about it, and that gift is legitimately changing the world and how we see it.

Straight up: hacking is one of the clearest paths to the greater good in tech.

I spend a lot of time (a lot of time) talking about technology in terms of doom. All the ways it gets used for crime, for harm, or just generally as something you need to protect yourself from. I know plenty of tech people who've seriously considered going fully analog and raising goats instead (I'm one of them, honestly, who doesn't love baby goats?).

But here's the thing I actually wanted to get across: for a couple of weeks every August, technology becomes something I love again. Something that inspires, motivates, and is worth the time and attention it takes. Something that can genuinely help the world get a little better.

And you, dear reader, get to hear all about it over the coming months. I can't wait.

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