Managed to convince the company to sponsor me for yet another external event, and this time it’s the first ever Defcon held in Singapore!
This was the first large scale cybersecurity community event that I went for and I can say that it did not disappoint.
The talks were informative, and the various events and villages were really fun and educational (Definitely did not spend an hour trying to pick a lock at the Lock and Key Village for a sticker). I especially found the talk titled “Surveilling Politicians, Unmasking Influencers, Fake Likes and Dying Together” by Dries Depoorter to be especially memorable. It wasn’t a particularly technical talk, but the creativity he shown through his work was something that I thought was particularly hilarious and admirable. This is even more so nowadays where we tend to outsource our thinking to LLMs.
The people were really chill and cool too! On the 3rd day, I met these 2 guys from Oman who were into AI hacking, and we just stood around talking about the different methods to jailbreak an LLM for at least 30 minutes. One of them was a magician of sorts and decided to show me a trick or 2, which was pretty intriguing.
Lastly, I have to shoutout the Hacker Jeopardy event!!! That was the icing on the cake for the whole Defcon experience. The host was really witty, along with the weird ass questions which only cybersecurity people will find funny. Oh, not to forget the everyone heckling DON’t F*** IT UP!
The only unfortunate part of the whole experience is the merch store ran out of shirts before I manage to get one :(. Got to make a note to myself to arrive early next time to snatch some merch for myself…
Overall, a 10 out of 10 experience! Will definitely try to attend future Defcons in the future.
