Scheduled Talks
In TDI Community Room

This will be a discussion group about how we talk (or don’t talk) about recovery, sobriety, mental wellness, burnout, grief, and other hard human things in cybersecurity spaces. Silence feeds stigma, but not everyone knows how to start the conversation safely or supportively. We’ll discuss language, boundaries, allyship, and ways to create community without turning every vulnerable conversation into a TED Talk or therapy session.

While purple teaming isn’t a new concept, getting purple teaming actually started and happening consistently is tough! Maybe your company or team experienced the one purple team event, then before you know it was back to red vs blue? Or maybe your purple team just never happened? Join Allie as she discusses her experiences with this struggle - where she dealt with only taking red team reports to make the blue team better, to finally getting them to collaborate and improve both teams!

We'd love to get all the gender non conforming, non-binary and women together to hang out and make friends! DEF CON is better with friends. Stop in for a bit, or the whole time.

Snacks and Drinks Sponsored by Adobe

AI is no longer on the horizon — it's already in our workflows, our attacker toolkits, and our vulnerability landscapes. For penetration testers and bug bounty professionals, the skills that got us here won't be enough to keep up.

This session is built for the full cyber community — students exploring careers, professionals breaking in, and program leaders rethinking their approach. We'll cover the training and certifications worth investing in, how to identify and close skill gaps, and why community, mentorship, and peer networks remain our most important growth asset. For those leading teams, we'll tackle a harder question: how do you build a learning culture that keeps up with change without burning people out? The AI field is moving fast. We have to move with it.

Mental Health Hackers is hosting a Birds of a Feather discussion in our space, topic TBA

Community is essential and so is continual learning. Reading books and discussing books can greatly impact an individual’s access and sense of community and knowledge. This Hacker Book Club book discussion will be an accessible group aiming to build community and share out learnings, all in a quieter setting. Come join us and discuss what you’ve been reading. We also run a year round Discord to discuss books throughout the year, hackerbookclub.com. This Hacker Book Club is not locked to a region and is for those who love books and escaping to the cyberpunk and scifi worlds that inspire DEF CON and modern literature. The DEF CON 34 theme is agency and our DEF CON themed book is The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin.

We threat model systems all the time. Almost nobody runs that same thinking on their own career, which is usually the most valuable thing they own. Let's spend two hours looking at your career the way you would look at something you are paid to defend: what is worth protecting, what could go wrong, where they are exposed, and what you are actually going to do about it. 

Everyone will leave with a filled-in canvas and one specific thing they have committed to in the next month.

This workshop is for any experience level.