Secret Knowledge
This year has seen several prominent computer-crime incidents, including denial-of-service attacks that hit prominent Web sites such as Yahoo! and CNN.com in February and the multibillion-dollar “Love Bug” virus attack that struck computers worldwide in May.
     Last year at Defcon, the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow premiered “BackOrifice 2000,” a program that lets network administrators or system crackers gain control of machines running Windows 2000.
     This year, with more and more companies reading employees’ e-mail and tracking their Web surfing, issues of privacy and anonymity are on the minds of Defcon speakers; several seminars address those topics. The hackers are also interested in the vulnerabilities of supposedly impregnable corporate firewalls.
     Denial-of-service attacks, notably, are missing from the schedule: True hackers consider them an amateurish act of vandalism, not worth their time.
     Because of the recent publicity, the hacker community has become skittish of anything involving DOS attacks, attendees said, whether it’s causing or curing them.

Green Hair and Boiler Suits
It’s easy to spot the Defcon attendees checking in at the Alexis Park —overwhelmingly young and male, they sport computer bags and dyed hair, and wear T-shirts that say things like “HackCanada” and “2600: The Hacker Quarterly.” One burly man checking in Thursday wore an orange boiler suit with bullets jammed in the breast pockets.
     There were some kids who were just testing out the lifestyle, like Matt, a hacker from San Antonio who came with his parents. Clean cut, soft-spoken, and 17, he said he came to Defcon to begin learning about computer security techniques.
     And there were many more women than one might expect: in tight leather pants, fishnets, or with green pigtails.
     Not everybody at Defcon is a hacker, Lawless says. Many are girlfriends, “scene whores,” federal agents doing “intelligence gathering,” young “script kiddies” aiming to become true experts, and computer security professionals.
     One buttoned-down, fiftysomething information systems manager from Montreal, who declined to give his name (Defcon attendees are often sticklers for privacy), said with a smile that guys like him were “ruining the con” for the hard-core audience who have been there since the first Defcon in 1993.