DEF CON 2025 Preview

DEF CON is almost upon us, so I interrupt my regular rant on security to give you some curated links and resources to help you on your journey!

📢I will be doing a book signing on Friday August 8th. Details to be finalized, but I should be listed in the Hacker Tracker app. Swing by!

If you are going to DEF CON this year, go ahead and reply and if there’s enough interest, maybe I can arrange a last minute meetup.

Enjoy!

Table of Contents

• DEF CON 33 Theme: Access Everywhere

• DEF CON Beginner’s Guides

• Ayman’s List of DEF CON Talks

• DEF CON Trailer

DEF CON 33 Theme: Access Everywhere

• Services should be usable no matter who you are.

• Services should be accessible no matter where you are.

• Services should not violate user privacy or security.

Checkout the link for more on the theme, but also the opening remarks with DT should not be missed where he will go deeper into the theme and other new things we should expect this year. 10am - Track 1

Schedule here: https://defcon.org/html/defcon-33/dc-33-schedule.html

DEF CON Beginner’s Guides

In case you missed it, I wrote two lengthy guides on DEF CON. Check em out.

Ayman’s List of DEF CON Talks

I put together a list of talks that I found kind of interesting. Some commentary for each one as well.

Your Interview Game is Weak: Gamifying Technical Interviews through Role-Playing

My good friend, and longtime hacker, Matt Torbin is taking a fresh new approach towards security interviews. Check it out!

Stories from a Tor dev

The co-founder and original developer of the Tor Projects gives some war stories. This could be very interesting.

Fear vs. Physics: Diagnosing Grid Chaos

No one loves FUD, which is why I like this talk. It might help us dissect what could realistically happen (still probably bad) and what we can do about it (like we don’t know). The Grid is an interesting topic to me, as I experienced a true to life black in NYC in 2003.

Remote code execution via MIDI messages

This looks like a fun talk and a good intro to hacking exercise for kids everywhere.

Mastering Apple's Endpoint Security for Advanced macOS Malware Detection

A more technical talk, but it’s be the defacto expert on MacOS security, Patrick Wardle.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Phish

Ok, this should be very entertaining!

A rare look behind the scenes of a global phishing-as-a-service operation. We tell the story of how we infiltrated a phishing group, cracked their software, exploited a hidden backdoor, and followed an OSINT rabbit hole to uncover the identify of the primary software developer.

DEF CON Trailer

Part of a video I made a couple years ago but never published. Enjoy!