Black Hat and DEF CON Security Conferences

Labeled Security Summer Camp by some, the Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences have been the premier events for security researchers and practitioners. Analysts Dan Kennedy and Justin Lam returned from the heat of Las Vegas to discuss their take on what went down in the desert with host Eric Hanselman. More than 23,000 attendees were reported to be part of the sprawling Black Hat start to the week and DEF CON has grown to be its equal in size. There was more discussion about the realities of what AI can do for and against security operations. The implications around Mythos have raised fears of a cascade of vulnerability disclosures that will overwhelm our ability to remediate them, but a growing risk comes from AI tooling being able to create more complex environments and processes to make complex vulnerabilities more easily exploitable.

On the security defense side, AI's ability to interpret complex interactions and relationships is showing potential to reduce the risk of rolling out new controls by understanding what policies could break. It's an area where there have historically been delays in improving protections where concerns that new controls might break existing applications or access held security teams back. One of the greatest benefits of the conferences, though, may be the ability of security professionals to gather together and have the informal interactions that are needed to support each other in the complex world that information security has become.
 
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Host/Author: Eric Hanselman 

Guests: Dan Kennedy and Justin Lam

Producer/Editor: Dylan Scheible