Hacker convention Defcon was evacuated Sunday after a bomb hoax.

Our apologies for tonight's interruption. We evacuated Caesars Forums in compliance with property safety teams. When we have more information, we'll post more.

Although we would have liked to return you to your regularly scheduled festivities, It looks like this is going to take a while to resolve.

At last month's Defcon, the United States Air Force invited pre-selected hackers to attempt to sabotage an F-15 fighter-jet data system:

And after two long days, the seven hackers found a mother lode of vulnerabilities that — if exploited in real life — could have completely shut down the Trusted Aircraft Information Download Station, which collects reams of data from video cameras and sensors while the jet is in flight.

For three years now, cryptographer Matt Blaze (previously) and his colleagues have hosted a Voting Village at Defcon, the annual hacker con in Vegas, in which all comers are welcomed to try to compromise a variety of voting machines that are in actual use in American elections.

Every year, security researchers gather at Defcon's Voting Village to probe voting machines and report on the longstanding, systematic security problems with them, in order to give secure voting advocates the ammunition they need to convince Congress and local officials to take action into improve America's voting security.

Update: Here is the indictment. Hutchins is accused of making and selling a keylogger called the "Kronos banking trojan."

Marcus Hutchins is the 23 year old security researcher behind the @MalwareTechBlog Twitter account; he's the guy who figured out that the Wannacry worm had an accidental killswitch built in and then triggered it, stopping the ransomware epidemic in its tracks. — Read the rest

Since the 2000 Bush-Gore election crisis and the hanging-chad controversy, voting machine vendors have been offering touchscreen voting machines as a solution to America's voting woes — and security researchers have been pointing out that the products on offer were seriously, gravely defective.

I'm making the final(ish*) stop of my Walkaway tour at Defcon this weekend in Las Vegas, giving a speech on Saturday in Track 2 at 10AM called $BIGNUM steps forward, $TRUMPNUM steps back: how can we tell if we're winning?, followed by a book-signing at the No Starch Press table in the exhibitors' hall.

Defcon, the hacker and security conference, is coming to Caesar's Palace this weekend (I'm speaking!), and that means that the hotel needs to start thinking hard about the security of its systems, likely to be targeted both in earnest (by people who want to spy on attendees) and in jest (by attendees who want to prank their fellows by announcing that they've compromised everyone's systems).

Last week, Andrew Tierney and Ken Munro from Pen Test Partners demoed their proof-of-concept ransomware for smart thermostats, which relies on users being tricked into downloading malware that then roots the device and locks the user out while displaying a demand for one bitcoin.

"The End of the Internet Dream," cyberlawyer Jennifer Granick's keynote at Black Hat, was all anyone could talk about at this year's Defcon — Black Hat being the grown-up, buttoned-down, military-industrial cousin to Defcon's wild and exuberant anarchy.

I'm speaking at Defcon this weekend in Las Vegas: my talk, "Fighting Back in the War on General Purpose Computers," is tomorrow (Friday) at 11AM in track 3, followed immediately by a signing at the No Starch Press table in the Champagne Ballroom at the Paris hotel.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation always has a huge presence at Las Vegas's DEFCON, but this year, we're hosting our first-ever badge-hack contest!

One of Elon Musk’s Tesla electric cars will be made available to hacker attendees, so they can tinker with any piece of the vehicle they like.

The US government may use visa restrictions to ban hackers from China from participating in the 2014 Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas. The move is part of a larger effort by the US to combat Chinese internet espionage. — Read the rest

For this year's DEFCON conference, the Electronic Frontier Foundation released an encryption-puzzle t-shirt (with glow-in-the-dark clues!) designed by EFF Senior Designer Hugh D'Andrade and Staff Technologist Micah Lee. The puzzle was fiendishly clever and made for a beautiful tee, and now it has been cracked by some of DEFCON's intrepid attendees, the first ten of whom stand to win a beautiful, limited edition, signed print.

One year ago today

Notes from DEFCON and DEFCON Kids: I brought my whole family — wife, daughter, and parents — and the kid got to do some lockpicking workshops at DEFCON Kids, the astoundingly bad-ass kids' computer literacy program run alongside the main event. — Read the rest

Defcon is an astounding hacker convention held annually in Las Vegas, and is known as an extraordinary environment in which spooks and hackers mix freely — last year, the head of the NSA gave a keynote in which he called for cooperation between security professionals and America's spies. — Read the rest

In a contest at the hacker conference Defcon, security specialist Shane MacDougall successfully penetrated Wal-Mart. "Social engineering is the biggest threat to the enterprise, without a doubt," MacDougall said after his call. "I see all these [chief security officers] that spend all this money on firewalls and stuff, and they spend zero dollars on awareness." — Read the rest

I've been posting lightly around here for the past week, as I've been at DEFCON, where I gave a speech. I brought my whole family — wife, daughter, and parents — and the kid got to do some lockpicking workshops at DEFCON Kids, the astoundingly bad-ass kids' computer literacy program run alongside the main event. — Read the rest

If you're headed to Las Vegas for DEFCON this summer, you're one of the lucky few who'll be able to get one of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's limited-edition, glow-in-the-dark "Encryption Saves" tees, only available to people who join the organization at the event. — Read the rest