White-hat hackers huddle in D.C.
The white hats don’t wear white hats. They wear jeans, shorts, T-shirts and hoodies; many had bike-messenger bags. They have beards of diverse lengths, shaved heads and multiple tattoos. Sometimes, the more eminent, established white hats can be found in khakis.
They are not white hats as a figure of style but as a figure of speech for the digital age: the good-guy hackers and security professionals in the war against the bad-guy hackers who topple Web sites, pilfer credit card account information and post aggravating spam links on Facebook pages — the black hats.
Those darn black hats are loathed by the 1,850 white hats from around the world who are at the Washington Hilton this weekend for the annual ShmooCon, where they attend talks titled “TTL of Penetration,” “Soft Markers in Attack Attribution” and “All Your Codes Belong to Me!” In between, they hack, play video games and sit around ballroom tables picking padlocks.
