DEF CON 30 comes of age with “Hacker Homecoming”

LAS VEGAS—Famed hacker convention DEF CON returns to Las Vegas this year at Caesars Forum as it celebrates its 30th year running.

Normally attracting thousands to tens of thousands of visitors, the event is back in person for the second straight year since the in‐person event was cancelled for COVID‐19 in 2020 and held online as “DEF CON Safe Mode.”

The theme of this year’s event is "Hacker Homecoming" as it seeks to welcome back a larger physical presence.

“We want DEF CON 30 to have the energy of a reunion. We’ll be back together in a brand spanking new venue. We’ll be 30 years old – an amazing milestone for a hacker conference under any circumstances. In honor of all that, we’re calling DEF CON 30 ‘Hacker Homecoming,’” organizers said.

Cybersecurity and information security (InfoSec) play a huge part of the annual conference with speakers from every facet of the industry presenting on security habits and exigent vulnerabilities in key software and hardware systems. Among them, speaker and security researcher Tomer Bar will be hosting a talk called “OopsSec – The bad, the worst, and the ugly of APT [advanced persistent threat] operations security.”

“We found unbelievable mistakes which allow us to discover new advanced TTPs [tactics, techniques, and procedures] used by attackers, for example, bypassing iCloud two‐factor authentication' and crypto wallet and NFT stealing methods,” Bar said. “We were able to join the attackers' internal groups, view their chats, bank accounts and crypto wallets. In some cases, we were able to take down the entire campaign.”

Cryptocurrency has been a popular target for hackers in recent years, with security firm Elliptic estimating that over $1 billion has been stolen from blockchain bridges thus far in 2022, stemming from five major hacks. 

A North Korean hacking group stole $625 million from blockchain-based online game Axie Infinity earlier this year, and over $100 million disappeared in June when Harmony blockchain’s Horizon Bridge was subject to a security flaw.

In addition, Computest Security Researcher Thijs Alkemade will be giving a presentation on the CVE‐2021‐30873 process injection vulnerability in macOS systems and how it has affected all macOS applications.

“In this talk, we'll explain what a process injection vulnerability is and why it can have critical impact on macOS,” Alkemade said, “Then, we'll explain the details of this vulnerability, including how to exploit insecure deserialization in macOS. Finally, we will explain how we exploited it to escape the macOS sandbox and elevate our privileges to root and bypass SIP [System Integrity Protection].”

A full schedule of this year’s event can be found online at defcon.org/html/defcon‐30/dc‐30‐schedule.html. Livestreams of some conferences and digital participation will occur on Twitch and the group’s Discord server.