The Black Hat evolution

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.csoonline.com/article/2597936/security-leadership/the-black-hat-evolution.html

By Ira Winkler
CSO
Aug 26, 2014

When the Black Hat conference moved to the Mandalay Bay hotel, I was 
curious as to what would be different. Over the years, Black Hat has 
evolved into something very different than how it started. Whether it has 
been a good or bad evolution depends on your perspective.

As background, I have the honor of being the first keynote speaker at the 
first Black Hat conference. The original event was an add on to the Defcon 
conference. At the time, Back Hat was the idea of one of the Jeff Moss’ 
friends who noticed that more and more corporate people were attending 
Defcon. The thought was to put on a more upscale event with similar 
content, and without the havoc of Defcon. The first year, at the soon to 
demolished Aladdin hotel, held all attendees in a relatively small 
conference room that sat less than 100 people.

The most memorable session, of course except for my own, involved hackers 
talking about how they had no guilt in releasing vulnerabilities. Those 
vulnerabilities inevitably caused damages, not to the vendors of the 
products, but to the end users of the systems who were left unprepared to 
fix the vulnerabilities, before suffering an inevitable attack.

Over the next few years, the Black Hat hype grew, which continued to grow 
Black Hat attendance. Through those years, I tended to speak on Social 
Engineering and related topics, and as such, I had packed audiences. Black 
Hat sessions tended to be on some highly technical subjects that the 
typical “suits”, looking very out of place, did not understand.

[...]

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