Editor’s note: Following is part two of Valiant Puck’s report from DEF CON 33. As said last week, it is based off of real events, but elements may be exaggerated or even fictionalized. It’s up to you, the reader, to decide for yourself what is real and what is not.
We awoke not enough hours later. Shins and I took the elevator down and stumbled into Flavortown. Twenty bucks for all-you-can-eat? A bargain or a trap. I couldn’t tell. But the French toast was divine, the bacon crisp, the eggs greasy, and the coffee black enough to summon demons. For a moment, Flavortown redeemed itself in my eyes. I could almost forgive the crimes of the first night we were there.
But time was a cruel mistress.
We left the hotel at 10 a.m., bound for the Las Vegas Convention Center via monorail. Our call time for the Social Engineering Community Village (SECVC) was 11 a.m., and the trains were running late, crawling like wounded snakes through the desert heat.
At the Westgate stop, panic set in. We were running out of time. The SECVC was on the third floor, and the escalators would be flooded with caffeine-addled hackers and guarded by the goons. Then we saw it: a 1971 White Cadillac Eldorado convertible, parked like a divine intervention next to the monorail station. It gleamed like cocaine in moonlight.
Shins didn’t hesitate. He hacked the starter driven by raw instinct, and the beast roared to life. I jumped in, clutching my badge like a holy relic. We tore across the parking lot, fishtailing through cones and chain-link fences, the Cadillac’s 8.2 liter V8 engine screaming with urgency. Shins was laughing maniacally. I leapt out over the passenger door like a deranged trapeze artist and sprinted inside.
Two flights of escalators. Thousands of bodies. DEF CON attendees in tactical kilts and cyberpunk flair. I dodged them like a linebacker in the Super Bowl, barreling through the chaos and into the SECVC room just in time.
Then the door closed.
Editor’s note: What happened next is difficult to document. Recording devices are strictly prohibited inside the SECVC, and so as the door closed behind Valiant, we could only speculate what happened next based off of what we heard in the hall.
From outside, muffled voices, laughter, and the booming voices of Ven and Valiant could be heard over the sound system.. The energy was palpable. Though the details remain unknown, it was clear that Ven and Valiant’s performance was resonating with the audience.
There was one last burst of deafening cheers and then the doors burst open.
Ven and I emerged like rockstars from a smoke-filled arena. The hallway erupted. Shins, Tango, and our CISO were there, slapping backs and shouting praise. Tango was grinning like a madman.
“That Hail Mary at the end,” he said. “You asked the bonus question right as the clock hit zero. She answered. You nailed it.”
“One of the judges said we may have in inadvertently started a prank war with that call,” I beamed back.
Victory. Chaos. Vegas. DEF CON. Just another day in the SECVC.
We joined the swarms of people on the escalators to make our way back down to the lower level. Shins and I were on a mission—half-mad, half-hopeful—stumbling toward the Soma FM music stage in search of a man known only as djDead, a spectral figure rumored to hold the keys to the artist badge for those chosen to grace the DEF CON soundtrack.
We wandered through the lower levels of the convention center, accosting every goon who crossed our path. “Have you seen djDead?” I asked, eyes twitching.
One goon, a woman with a badge covered in cryptic stickers, squinted at me.
“Do you even know what he looks like?”
“No,” I said. “Every time I ask, no one will tell me.”
She leaned in, conspiratorial. “He’s got long blue hair. Riding a Rascal.”
Of course. A cyberpunk oracle on a mobility scooter. It made perfect sense. We walked on toward where the stage was set up.
And then—like a glitch in the simulation—he appeared. Blue hair flowing, Rascal humming like a low-flying drone. We hailed him like sailors spotting land after months at sea. I asked about the badge. He spoke with compassion and regret.
“There were instructions,” he said. “Sent in an email. A month ago. You were supposed to be notified and respond back.”
“I got nothing,” I said. “I’ve been checking every folder—focused inbox, Other, even the cursed Spam. Nothing.”
He nodded solemnly, like a man who’s seen too many broken dreams. “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try to get you on the list.”
We exchanged Signal handles like Cold War spies, traded stickers, and parted ways.
Then came Tango, emerging from the crowd like a scavenger, clutching a handful of DEF CON badge screws and bolts, the remains of fallen tech relics. He was plotting to sway the Policy Village into awarding him a CTF flag for possessing “a DEF CON 33 exclusive item that is very much desired and in rare supply.” It was genius.
Mission One: Complete. Mission Two: Underway. I debated going back upstairs, to familiarity but the SEC was starting to feel like a padded cell. I needed out. I needed more. I cracked open Hacker Tracker like a man rifling through a spreadsheet full of marketing contacts. I had heard that there are some great talks at DEF CON. I perused the afternoon’s agenda. There it was, Marketing Strategies and Analytics, a title so dry to anyone else it could have been printed on a box of saltines, but it called to me.
I climbed to the second floor, past the twitchy-eyed coders and the caffeine casualties, to the Creator Stages—a place where PowerPoints beckon like the neon lights of the strip outside. I got in line behind a man who smelled like solder and sweat. When they say people at DEF CON don’t sleep, don’t shower, I will use him as definitive proof. When the doors opened, I took a seat near the front, dead center. Prime real estate for absorbing knowledge. Terrible for escape. I was boxed in like a rat in a velvet trap.
Then he appeared.
A man who looked like he’d just stepped out of a Tolkien fever dream—long beard, granny glasses, wizard hat perched atop his skull like a crown of madness. He clipped a mic to his shirt with the solemnity of a priest preparing for exorcism.
And then he spoke.
“Do YOU know what marketing people do with cookies?”
Silence. The kind that makes your teeth itch.
“Whatever you search for online, that data is stored in cookies, which marketing people then look at so they can see what you are interested in. AND THEN THEY SERVE ADS TO YOU ABOUT THE VERY THINGS YOU SEARCH FOR!”
Sweet Jesus. This was Marketing 101—the kind of stuff they teach in the basement of community colleges and the back alleys of LinkedIn Learning. I felt the sweat bead on my forehead. I was the wolf among sheep. I was the social engineer. I was the one pulling strings, planting ideas, whispering sweet manipulations into the ears of the unsuspecting.
And now the wizard was staring at me.
He knew.
I stayed for ten more minutes, each second a slow-motion car crash. His eyes burned through me like acid on celluloid. I faked a phone call—classic move. Emergency. Urgent. Life or death. I grabbed my bag, hunched low like a fugitive, and slithered out of the room with the grace of a man dodging a subpoena.
Outside, the air was cooler. Cleaner. I had escaped. But the truth lingered like smoke in my lungs. I laughed as I realized that while I had felt like I was the odd one out, imposter syndrome real and in full glory, I had just been exposed as a social engineer in my own right. I was actually one of them.
The halls were alive. Buzzing. Twitching. A thousand minds high on information and a sense of belonging, all chasing the ghost of enlightenment through dimly lit corridors and flickering fluorescent lights. I wandered the thickly packed halls, peeking into rooms like a robber casing a bank, handing out stickers like narcotics to anyone who acknowledged me. No rhyme, no reason, just bonding over clever cartoons and slogans and the slight smell of adhesive.
Then I saw a sign programmed to capture my attention. AI Village. Like a neon omen. I followed it, drawn in by the promise of synthetic minds and digital sorcery. I met a British man inside named Drew and we talked about deepfakes and social engineering like it was a new religion. We had delved into a lot of work this year that revolved around defending against this new magic. I told him my theories on how the filters in apps like Snapchat have warped our perception of reality, made the unnatural seem normal.
He showed me a test. Twenty-five images. Some real, some fake. I had to guess. I scored 14 out of 25—average. Mediocre. Human. The implications were terrifying. Reality was melting, and we were all just licking the spoon.
I left the AI Village with my brain buzzing like a hornet’s nest. Down the hall, I passed an emo hacker girl from Detroit—black eyeliner, combat boots, and an enamel pin collection on her denim vest that could rival those found in the pit at Warped Tour. She wanted to trade. She told me she had social anxiety, but came to DEF CON to break the cycle, to reach out. I told her I came to Vegas chasing the myth of community—where disagreement didn’t mean disconnection, where chaos could still breed kinship.
She lunged forward and hugged me like a long-lost sibling in a collapsing universe. Then she lassoed a black tee shirt around my neck as an offering and whispered thanks for proving the myth was real.
She vanished. I examined the shirt. DEF CON logo: a happy face with crossed bones—like a pirate emoji on acid. Over it, a sticker: “I voted?” with an American flag. I then looked up and saw the Voting Village. It was a sign. A cosmic breadcrumb.
I floated toward the door like a moth to flame. Inside, the room was lined with ballots and machines, like a cyberpunk DMV. I spoke with a man who’d testified before Congress—an oracle of electoral infrastructure. He told me about the attacks on their group from the manufacturers who hated the truth, the vulnerabilities they tried to bury. I remembered Ven—DEF CON legend—who once rigged the machines to elect a rodent mascot as supreme ruler of the universe. Madness. Genius. Democracy. So this is what Hacktivism is all about.
I left the Voting Village with my stomach growling and my head full of static. I needed to find Shins and Tango. I needed to go offline for affordable food someplace quiet.
I needed to recalibrate before the next descent into digital delirium.
The evening started with shrimp. Baja citrus shrimp tacos, to be exact—divine little bastards served at a Mexican joint that, tragically, didn’t serve alcohol. A dry oasis in a city built on sin. We were meeting some hacker village folk there, DEF CON lifers with eyes like surveillance drones and hearts full of caffeine. Their leader, a red teamer by the name of Solaris invited us to join them after at Area 15, some kind of neon art vortex, but all three of us declined. For Tango, it was too much chaos. For me, too much risk. I was already exhausted and anxious to go back to the room and write. I followed Shins and Tango back to the Convention Center via Uber. The driver was a man who was the live-action spitting image of Homer Simpson. He was a Vegas local who was born and raised on Paradise and never left. We spent the drive back reminiscing about the time Paradise was 15 feet under water during one of Vegas’s notorious floods. It turns out that the whole city runs downhill and then pools to drown a whole block of the entertainment district.
I considered taking the monorail back to The Horseshoe, but then we passed a party featuring a rapper/DJ spitting bars about cybersecurity. Firewalls, exploits, zero-days. It was surreal. DEF CON poetry. I was again shocked that I was on the same soundtrack. No comparison. Mine was probably the only track that wasn’t techno, and our lyrics were nothing out of Hacker-core.
After 20 minutes the pulsating lights and bass finally did me in, and so I fist-bumped Tango and told him I was heading back. I left the convention center, making the long walk across the empty parking lot. I lit one of the infused pre-rolls and smoked down a whole gram before I hit the escalator to the station.
On the monorail, I met two Canadians from Toronto—let’s call them Trevor and Barry. They were salesmen for a cybersecurity startup, discussing social engineering and asking about the vishing contest. Once inside The Horseshoe, they asked where the resort tower elevators were. I said I was heading that way. They mentioned a legendary party on the 26th floor that was invite only, but they were inviting me. I said, “Eh, why not for a few minutes?” At the very least, I could make Shins jealous.
Inside the suite, I ordered a Margarita. The bartender apologized—only vodka and Margarita mix. I said it would do for now.
“It’s gonna taste like shit, you know,” he warns me as he fills the cup. I reaffirmed that I knew what I was getting myself into. I took a sip and laughed hard, “Holy shite, my dude… you’ve inadvertently discovered the secret recipe for Mad Dog 20/20!” He didn’t know what that was. I explained: $4.99 fruit juice infused with alcohol, the nectar of high school degenerates. He laughed. The ice was broken.
Then came a certain YouTube personality, some cyber-famous face, who will rename nameless because I didn’t know who he was. He whispered of a better party on the same floor. We migrated. Inside the second location I got a rum and Coke Zero and followed Barry to a pool table where we talked sales strategy until my soul began to leak out of my ears. I blamed exhaustion and bailed.
Back in my room a few moments later, dazed and vibrating, I decided to descend into Flavortown for another round of trashcan nachos and to work on this very article for the Alias Cybersecurity blog. I sat alone at a booth for three. The server immediately removed the other two place settings and warned me they’d be counting napkins when I left. I played dumb, made a plea of innocence, and as soon as his back was turned, I slid to the next booth and stole a place setting, hiding mine under my thigh like a criminal mastermind.
This is DEF CON after all. This is Vegas. This is madness.
The manager brought my nachos over and then told me how amazing the wings on their menu are. Feeling good I asked for an order. He read back the sauce options, the usual suspects. Buffalo. BBQ. Dry lemon pepper. I chose the latter and he backed away marveling a loud about what a great choice that was. As soon as they were delivered, I sank my teeth into a juicy wing just as chaos ensued next to me.
Before I could even register how it tasted, the staff rushed over like first responders called to a fire. Their night was unraveling fast. Flavortown were suddenly consumed by a midnight meltdown—a woman with two kids in tow, shrieking about the existential difference between Captain Morgan and tequila. It was a symphony of rage and poor parenting. I used the distraction like a seasoned thief, slipping another towel under my hoodie with the grace of a raccoon in a dumpster.
Then came the manager, face flushed with corporate shame, muttering as Randall did in the movie “Clerks” about how he “wasn’t even supposed to be there that night”, apologizing for the woman’s outburst like he’d personally summoned her from the depths of Yelp Hell. I reassured him, no harm done, while anxiously feeling like the towel under my hoodie was screaming out for rescue.
He asked if I needed a box and a to-go baggie, and I said yes—along with the check—but warned him I’d be lingering a bit longer, clacking away at my keyboard like a caffeinated court stenographer. He nodded, understanding the vibe, but reminded me with bureaucratic precision that I had exactly 51 minutes before the place shut down. Not 50. Not an hour. Fifty-one. The countdown had begun.
A few moments later and he brought the check, and there it was: one trashcan nachos at $26.99, one lemon pepper dry rub wings at $35.99… and six towels, itemized at $12.99 each. I laughed out loud. In the end, I hadn’t been a pirate after all. I’d been social engineered by the manager of Flavortown. A towel connoisseur turned mark. The bastard had flipped the script.
Just as I was preparing to vanish into the neon ether, Kelvin (the waiter who’d been verbally assaulted by the tequila-confused banshee) came over to top off my water and clear the wreckage of my meal. I told him he did nothing wrong. The woman was a walking migraine with a misplaced sense of justice. Kelvin nodded, grateful, and then the conversation took a hard left into the deep end.
Turns out Kelvin was a foster kid. I told him I’d been a foster dad. We bonded instantly, two strangers in the belly of Flavortown, trading trauma like baseball cards. He told me his parents were in a cult. His father murdered his mother. Seven siblings scattered into the system like dice on a casino floor. But Kelvin was thankful for the family that took him in and taught him that everyone is deserving of love no matter how different they look. We fist-bumped. It was real. It was heavy. It was Vegas.
As I was leaving, Kelvin chased me down. “Can I shake your hand?” he asked, breathless. “Absolutely,” I said, and he ran over, grinning, and slipped more towels into my to-go bag like a magician planting contraband. I didn’t stop him.
Back in my hotel room, I laid them all out across the comforter like sacred tiles, six, maybe seven, forming a makeshift bedspread in an artistic style called Fieri. A shrine to chaos. A tapestry of absurdity. A soft, absorbent monument to my first DEF CON.
I slid under the covers carefully so that they would still be laid out when Shins came stumbling in an hour or so later. I giggled manically as I fell asleep.
I woke up in a haze, the kind that clings to your skin like casino carpet dust. The room was silent except for the soft, rhythmic blinking of a red LED buried in Shins’ gear bag—his only sign of life. He was buried under the covers like a corpse in a tech tomb. I had no time to dig him out.
The SECVC awards were at 10 a.m., and I needed to be there. No breakfast. No ceremony. I stuffed a six-pack of Modelo into my shoulder bag, a ritual of necessity, and bolted for the monorail.
Then the message came in—our CISO, calm but cryptic: “Monorail’s down. Possibly hacked. Only one train running. And it’s going in the wrong direction.”
Of course. The city was turning against us.
I panicked, summoned an Uber to the Horseshoe, and sprinted through the casino like a man possessed. Slot machines blinked like surveillance drones. The Uber driver, confused and possibly high, parked on the wrong side of the building. We spoke in frantic bursts over the phone, trying to triangulate each other’s location. Finally, we synced up. I told him I was late for an awards ceremony. He hit the gas with reckless abandon.
We tore through Vegas, dodging traffic and existential dread, and screeched to a halt at the West Hall of the Convention Center with three minutes to spare. I bolted up the escalator steps, skipping the lazy crawl of the machinery, and barreled down the hallway like the Coked Up Cowboy from the Velveteen Rabbit had just kicked in.
The doors to the Social Engineering Community Village opened just as I arrived. I flashed my pass and slipped in ahead of the crowd—hundreds of hackers waiting in line. I took a seat near the front, heart pounding, Modelo sweating in my bag.
The first award was for Best Team. The judges spoke: “This team was the most fun to watch. They worked together beautifully.”
Then they said our name.
I stood up, dazed and grinning, and claimed the trophy. The crowd erupted. Cameras flashed. I posed with the judges like a man who’d just survived a war and won a medal for style.
Then, as if summoned by fate, a message pinged on Signal from djDead: “Your artist badge is ready.”
The day was turning golden.
In the hallway, I ran into Tango, glowing with triumph. He held up a Policy CTF flag, proof that his insane plan had worked. He was a winner too.
Downstairs, I entered the “inhuman” registration zone, where speakers, goons, and village organizers checked in. I received my glorious artist badge, a talisman of validation in a world built on chaos.
For me, I had achieved all that I had wanted. It was now time to slow down and take in the rest of DEF CON.
I wandered through the hacker villages like a man in a lucid dream. I saw Blue Teamers defending an airport from cyber attacks in a simulation that felt too real. I saw the Car Hacking Village, where laptop-wielding maniacs dissected automotive systems like surgeons on speed. I saw a Critical Infrastructure Village, where I had a lengthy discussion with a guide, explaining my theory on how future wars might be fought from couches—enemy states launching digital missiles into each other’s power grids and water systems. Taking down countries from within. Floods. Service failures. Like all the things we feared about Y2K finally coming to fruition twenty-five years later.
I lost myself in the hacker world. I had come to Las Vegas to find community.
And now I was part of it.
We left the Convention Center like fugitives escaping a collapsing regime. DEF CON was over. The villages were shutting down, the goons were packing up their radios, and the hackers were scattering like cockroaches under casino lights. The air smelled like solder and stale Red Bull. I handed out the last of the cans of Modelo to, no longer strangers, but brothers and sisters in digital arms I met in the hallway as I made my way out the door and back into the sunlight.
I met up with Shins, Ven, and Solaris at the Double Down Saloon, a punk rock dive bar so filthy and legendary it might’ve been built on top of a cursed burial ground. The walls were covered in graffiti and stickers. The music was loud—The Cramps, naturally—blasting through blown-out speakers like a sonic middle finger to sobriety as we entered the place.
The bartender looked like he’d been awake since the Bush administration. Shins, ever the agent of chaos, ordered a round of the house specialty: Ass Juice. A drink so vile it had its own mascot—a crude skeleton man squatting over a glass, liquid squirting from his rear like a demonic juice cleanse.
I raised my glass halfway, and fearing sensory overload turned to Solaris, deploying a subtle social engineering maneuver.
“Does this smell bad to you?”
He lifted. He sniffed. “Smells like beet juice.”
“Oh good,” I muttered, lifting the glass to my nose like a man sniffing a crime scene. It tasted like vegetable juice and vodka. The kind of drink that makes your liver file for divorce and your soul question its lease agreement. We were still buzzing from the chaos of the final day, riding the edge of burnout and enlightenment.
We parted ways with Solaris, still vibrating from the last round of madness, and made our way back to the Horseshoe—the neon temple of sin and salvation. One last pilgrimage to Flavortown, where the nachos are trashy and the beer is holy. Grease and hops. The sacred pairing. The communion of those who’s bodies are on the verge of shutdown after a week of running them like competitors in the annual Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race in Queens, New York.
We debriefed over a pool of melted cheese while an absurd sports channel tried to distract us with live broadcasts from an extreme Microsoft Excel speed-running competition, slippery stair climbing, and robot combat.
I tuned back into the table conversation. Did DEF CON meet expectations? What knowledge did we extract from the chaos? What alliances were forged in the fire?
Shins talked about air traffic control hacking.
Ven recounted the SECVC pandemonium for those who missed it.
I stared into my final beer internally reviewing the answers to my own questions.
I had come to DEF CON chasing a myth. After years of slinging sleazy campaigns from the trenches of advertising agencies and mid-tier marketing departments, I joined a team that gave me something rare – purpose. And I followed them into the desert to find out what hacker culture really meant.
Social Engineering 101.
If you want to influence an audience, you have to understand them. You have to crawl inside their skulls, wear their skin, think their thoughts. You have to listen to their music, speak their language, and walk their crooked paths. And sometimes, you realize you’re not pretending to fit in—the role was written for you all along.
Ven said it more than once this last week:
“You belong to a world you never knew existed.”
He was right. My path was different, but the rhythm was familiar. I didn’t just understand the culture—I had always understood it. I just hadn’t known its name.
The waiter came to take our plates. I tightly rolled one final Jolly-Guy towel under the table and slipped it under my shirt.
Our flight was early. The night was ending.
We parted ways, wishing each other safe passages home.
I had come to Las Vegas to go to a hacker conference. But DEF CON wasn’t just a conference. It was a futuristic storm cloud on the horizon—shifting, shimmering, real. A place where we discover not always what is, but what will be.
And I walked into it without looking back.
The Signal and the Sand: My Mythic Descent into the World’s Largest Hacker Conference. The following is based off of real events, but elements may be exaggerated or even fictionalized. ...
