Jeff Moss
More info
- Alias
- The Dark Tangent
- Known for
- Founding DEF CON (1993) and Black Hat (1997)
Founder of DEF CON and Black Hat, the two conferences that make Las Vegas the world's densest gathering of hackers every summer.
DEF CON began in 1993 as a party for a few hundred people from the BBS scene and grew into tens of thousands of attendees, lockpicking villages, voting-machine villages and the perennial game of Spot the Fed. In 1997 Moss launched the Black Hat Briefings, its suit-wearing sibling where companies send staff on the clock; he sold it to CMP Media in 2005.
Moss has also crossed into the establishment, joining the US Homeland Security Advisory Council in 2009 and serving as ICANN's chief security officer from 2011 to 2013. The year DEF CON asked federal agencies to sit one out says something about how awkwardly those roles can collide.