GoKawiilThe first thing I learned at Defcon was that I apparently didn’t know what a badge was.
I already had one hanging around my neck: the press credential that got me through the door at the annual hacker convention in Las Vegas in early August. Yet everywhere I looked, people stood in long lines to buy more. When I asked what they were waiting for and heard “badges,” I glanced down at mine, confused.
I would soon learn that Defcon badges can be electronic puzzles, soldering projects, collectibles and signs of belonging to a culture I was experiencing for the first time. Those badges were my first indication of how much I had to learn.
Everyone else seemed to understand the schedule, the language and the unwritten rules. But me? I felt like I was back in high school and had somehow missed orientation.
Over the next few days, talking with professionals, hobbyists and other beginners made cybersecurity feel much more accessible. For the first time, I could see a path from playing around with hacking tools to actually understanding how they work.
I was a script kiddie before I knew what that meant
I wasn’t completely new to hacking. In college at UCLA, I spent more time than I probably should have in the library experimenting with Firesheep, a Firefox extension that demonstrated how exposed session cookies could be intercepted over shared Wi-Fi. Watching it work showed me how easily technology could be manipulated.
I didn’t build Firesheep or understand the code behind it. I knew how to install it and click around. In hacker terminology, that made me a script kiddie: someone who uses tools created by other people without fully understanding how they work.
Still, I loved testing technology’s limits and making it do things it wasn’t designed to do. I liked the feeling of opening a door everyone else assumed was locked. That curiosity stuck, even if my technical knowledge never caught up.
Defcon was my chance to see whether it finally could.
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