My First Defcon!

This post is copied from my LinkedIn

Here's a late DefCon post! (Same month counts, right?)

tl;dr: I met amazing people, learned from them, and won my first CTF!

This year I attended my first DefCon. I had no idea what to expect, as I had only really heard about it from the Darknet Diaries podcast.

Because this was my first ever cybersecurity event, I organized a climbing meetup on Day 1. Since I'm very comfortable socializing in a climbing gym, I figured that I could make use of my sport in order to create some connections in the cyber world. I quickly met the witty Luke McGuinness, and we quickly bonded over a shared interest in both scaling small rocks and breaking into computer systems. (A small caveat is that Luke is a full-fledged pentester and I have merely dreamt of such activities).

In the afternoon, I spent some time in the merch line chatting with David Broggy. A funny happenstance is that he and my dad, and his son and me both share the same name (Dave and Jake, respectively). I was very grateful to have the opportunity to talk with someone who has so much experience in the field.

On Day 2, I picked up some fun new toys from the vendors, then headed over to the villages where I was quickly overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the event. This was the day that I won my first CTF, but the story exceeded the character limit of a LinkedIn post, so you can find the writeup on my GitHub at some point at https://github.com/korekim. That night, I attended the Bishop Fox party with Luke and met David Rushmer, MSc, Christopher Hansen, Peter Van Splunder, and James, whom I forgot to exchange contact information with. Everyone had such interesting jobs, and I had a blast listening to stories about engagments and showing off my shiny new Keysight hardware hacking case that I had earned in the CTF.

I'm running out of characters, so I'll make the rest short. The next couple of days I attended talks about OT and ICS security by Mike Holcomb, and hung out with the group whilst meandering around the various villages.

All in all, it was an amazing event, and I can't wait to attend next year! Thanks to everyone who made it a great time, and I hope to see y'all soon!