Glory Days; Why I Miss the "Old" InfoSec

It's easy to get caught up in the hype within the information security community. There's always some elite hacker doing some fuzz-hash-crypt-'sploit who we should all envy droppin' o-day. Hell, Project Zero does that like weekly at this point with write-ups that make most of us feel like we just saw a computer for the first time.

That's alright, though, because the promise of the community is that people will welcome you regardless of leet status. Infosec has waves of community versus corporatization and efforts like B-Sides restores some faith in the kind of event most of us "grew up" with.

For me, Rubi-Con was the be-all, end-all, of infosec. If you were in Detroit 15 years ago, that was the place to be for both kinship and also the best research east of Vegas. Folks like Jon Erickson, Marius Eriksen, Richard Forno, Richard Thieme, Dead Addict, Mikko Hypponen, Seth Hardy, Luke Kanies, and Michael Lucas all graced a crappy hotel conference room "stage" at one point or another in front of me.

My first con, at 15, was Rubi-Con 4. I got my on-site FreeBSD box owned via a single-user boot. Was I angry? Sure! But later that day, in the hallway with my friend Simon9x, I installed OpenBSD for the first time. This isn't a story because of that, though, it's a story because that does NOT happen at the cons these days. Kali Live CDs, need not apply.

Everything is so sterile, so organized, so "community", that you lose the hacker part of the equation. Sure, you've got your wall of sheep but that's more a media ploy than actually anything related to the scene anymore.

The days of a white tablecloth scrolled with a list of usernames and passwords for shell accounts in Canada is long gone. Now we're writing $up3r $3kr1t onion addresses for the next takedown target of the U.S. government.

While I'll surely attend RSA, Black Hat, DEF CON, and other tier-1 events this year, the real connection I previously made with the community is a large departure from the intent of those events. The old scene groups are a relic of my past. There's no "Mobsters" or "Project Nexus" anymore. We can't have groups that aren't somehow related to Anonymous or some "hacker space" that's just a bunch of 3D printers and hot glue guns.

I'm sure "Glory Days" is playing in the background behind me, but as Notorious B.I.G. once said, "Things Done Changed.", and I miss it.