This is a list of random things that I learned while I attended DefCon 27 last week August 8-11, 2019. This list could help new attendees next year. This was my first year attending and I didn’t really know what I was going to experience.
- With over 30,000 attendees being patient was a must have skill.
- Many popular speakers had long wait lines.
- If there was a speaker I really wanted to see, I attended the talk the hour before so that I had a seat.
- For topics and speakers that I could not participate in, I was told that most major speakers were recorded so I can view later.
- The hands-on labs were the best for one on one learning.
- I learned that my red team skills are more developed than my blue team skills.
- I also obtained additional red team skills while visiting the red team village. Shout out to Omar Santos for open source lab materials and tools available at h4cker.org
- DefCon is run by a group of hacker volunteers. One of the things I noticed is that things didn’t always start on time which made it harder to schedule my day.
- The HackerTracker app for IOS and Andriod was the best source of knowing the what and where events were happening.
- Picking locks and bypassing locks were very fun labs to participate in.
- I walked 25k steps per day which is 2-3 times my normal walking. Vegas is big!
- DefCon27 Spanned 4 resorts.
- Due to how much traffic the Vegas strip has, it was faster to walk than to take an Uber or Taxi.
