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07/01/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 07/01/2024 08:35

Black Hat & Def Con 2024

Black Hat USA 2024

Black Hat USA - one of the world's largest and most important cybersecurity conferences - is back for its 27th year.

  • Location: Mandalay Bay Convention Center, Las Vegas
  • Dates: August 3-8, 2024
  • Schedule:
    • Four days of security Trainings (Saturday Aug 3 - Tuesday Aug 6) - view schedule
    • Two day main conference with Briefings & Business Hall (Wednesday Aug 7 - Thursday Aug 8) - view schedule
  • Hotels:
    • Discounted resort fees when booking through Convention Housing Partners at one of 14 hotels - book now
  • Register Now ›

 

DEF CON 32

DEF CON returns to Vegas directly following Black Hat.

  • Location: Las Vegas Convention Center - West Hall and Sahara Hotel
  • Dates: August 8-13, 2024
  • Schedule:
  • Hotels:
    • Discounted resort fees at Rio along with blocks of rooms at Resort World and other hotels - view options
  • Register Now ›


Highlights from Black Hat 2023

  • The 2023s event ended just a month before one of the largest ransomware attacks in history occurred at MGM Resort in Las Vegas - with more than $100m losses reported.
  • Large Language Models (LLM) seemed to permeate the event this year - not unlike Google Cloud Next 23, RSA Conference 2023, and the rest of the tech world during the past year since the widespread release of ChatGPT. Perhaps the best use of LLMs at Black Hat was IRonMAN: InterpRetable Incident Inspector Based ON Large-Scale Language Model and Association miNing from the team at CyCraft Technology. In this talk, the team showed how LLMs can help with events coming from the command-line which are particularly challenging because of obfuscation (such as with regular expressions), words having multiple meanings, multiple words having the same meaning, and other peculiarities of natural language - which LLMs are especially good at solving for.
  • This year's keynote, by Maria Markstedter, founder of Azeria Labs. was titled "Guardians of the AI Era: Navigating the Cybersecurity Landscape of Tomorrow". The talk was focused on the challenges and transformation happening in the security industry created by the rise of Generative AI.
  • Black Hat and DEF CON founder Jeff Moss, along with DARPA, announced the AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) - "a two-year competition aimed at driving innovation at the nexus of AI and cybersecurity to create a new generation of cybersecurity tools." The finals and semifinals for the competition will be held at Black Hat 2024 and 2025. The top 5 teams in the semifinal will be awarded $2 million each, while the top 3 winners in the final will be awarded $4 million, $3 million and $1.5 million.
  • The conflict in Ukraine, a hot topic at Black Hat 2022, was once again a center stage as CISA director Jen Easterly presented on the lessons learned from cyberwar. The presentation "Phoenix Soaring: What We Can Learn from Ukraine's Cyber Defenders about Building a More Resilient Future" warned of the likelihood of cyberattacks occurring in America, similar to those happening against Ukraine.

 

Highlights from DEF CON 2023

  • For the first time ever, the Wall of Sheep included a live feed of the location of individuals who were leaking data. According to Politico, by Friday afternoon "there were at least 2,000 sheep at DEF CON, per the floor-to-ceiling projection." The ever-popular Wall of Sheep is a live interactive board of Def Con attendees who have had their username and password exposed while at the event.
  • Congratulations go to Carnegie Mellon's Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP), the winningest hacking team in Def Con's Capture the Flag (CTF) competition as it took its 7th victory over the past 11 years.
  • The Generative Red Team (GRT) Challenge was at AI Village was the largest-ever public challenge to find bugs in LLMs like ChatGPT. This event was supported by the White House Office of Science, Technology, and Policy, the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate, and the Congressional AI Caucus.

Watch this interview with Kellee Wicker, Director of the Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Wilson Center, to get a unique take on the event.

 

Listen to NPR's All Things Considered report on Def Con 2023

 

Check out the EFF's talks from Def Con 21

 

Don't miss Coffee Talk with SURGe, broadcast live from Las Vegas with Splunkers Ryan Kovar, Shannon Davis, and Audra Streetman

 

Photos from Black Hat

Check out some of our favorite photos from the event below. See more on Flickr.