Jeff Moss: The Las Vegas Party That Became DEF CON

Every summer, tens of thousands of hackers pour into Las Vegas for DEF CON, and the man at the center of it still answers to the handle he picked as a teenager: the Dark Tangent.

Jeff Moss built the two conferences that anchor the security calendar. DEF CON is the anarchic one, where attendees pick locks, break voting machines and compete to spot undercover federal agents in the crowd; Black Hat is its buttoned-up twin for corporations and governments. Along the way, Moss has been sworn in at Homeland Security, hired to protect the internet's address system and seated on the board of a Swiss luxury group.

None of it was planned. DEF CON started as a going-away party for a friend who never turned up.

Jeff Moss at a Glance

• Born in 1970, Moss was a California teenager with a borrowed modem who, by the late 1980s, was running 11 bulletin board systems out of a spare room as The Dark Tangent.
• In 1993 a farewell party for a dying hacker network became the first DEF CON: roughly 100 people in Las Vegas.
• After a criminal justice degree from Gonzaga University, he worked in Ernst & Young's information security division and became a director at Secure Computing.
• In 1997 he launched Black Hat for the corporate and government crowd. He sold it to CMP Media in 2005 and kept DEF CON.
• Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano swore him onto her advisory council in 2009, and ICANN made him its chief security officer in 2011.
• He asked the feds to sit out DEF CON in 2013, took the conference to Beijing in 2018, ran it online in 2020 and joined CISA's new advisory committee in 2021.
• When Caesars dropped DEF CON without warning in early 2024, he moved the whole event to the Las Vegas Convention Center with about seven months to spare.
• Today he runs DEF CON Franklin, which pairs hacker volunteers with small water utilities, alongside a conference that now draws tens of thousands every August.

The Life of Jeff Moss

The Dark Tangent's Bulletin Boards

Moss got online as a California teenager with a dial-up modem borrowed from a neighbor. By the late 1980s he was running 11 bulletin board systems from a spare room, war dialing for new numbers and, as he later put it, "obsessed with information, obsessed with connection."

The handle came from a comic book he misremembered. The Dark Tangent stuck, and his boards became the main American hub for a web of hacker networks that traded messages over Fido-style dial-up links.

He ran them with a firm hand. "If people were not being very relevant, I'd just delete them," he told The Record in 2025.

A Party for a Dead Network

In 1993 the organizer of one of those networks, a Canadian system called Platinum Net, was shutting it down because his father had taken a new job and the family was moving away. Moss, the network's main US hub, was helping him plan a closing party for its members.

Then the organizer left early and disappeared. Moss was now planning a party for a network that no longer existed, so he invited everyone: the members of every other network his board belonged to, plus anyone on the #hack chat channel.

He offered to host it in Las Vegas and sent out faxes, including one to the Secret Service. The plan was about as detailed as "the room opens at two. See you there at two." About 100 people showed up.

The name was a triple pun. DEF sits on the 3 key of a phone, a nod to phreaks; DEFCON is military shorthand for defense condition; and in WarGames, Seattle teenager David Lightman picks Las Vegas as the city to nuke. Moss lives in Seattle and was throwing a con in Vegas, so, as DEF CON's own FAQ puts it, it all just sort of worked out.

Spot the Fed

The one-off party became an annual event, and its rituals grew up with it. Attendees play a round-the-clock Capture the Flag, pick locks and compete in Spot the Fed, a contest that hands out prizes for outing undercover government agents.

Moss had a day job through much of it. After a criminal justice degree from Gonzaga, he worked in Ernst & Young's information system security division and as a director at Secure Computing Corporation, where he set up its professional services department in the United States, Asia and Australia.

The con kept growing anyway. In the last few years before the pandemic, DEF CON drew roughly 25,000 to 28,000 people a year, and DEF CON 27 in 2019 set a record at about 30,000.

Black Hat, for the Suits

In 1997 Moss launched Black Hat to bring advanced security education to the professionals inside global corporations and federal agencies, mixing the best minds of the computer underground with the people paid to keep them out.

He's described the split simply: "One's infosec, one's hacker. One's kind of 'keep DEF CON weird.'"

Black Hat became the place where big research dropped, including a headline-making 2005 talk about running hostile code on Cisco routers. That November, CMP Media bought the conference for a reported eight-figure sum, and Moss stayed on as its director.

DEF CON wasn't part of the deal. "They weren't interested in DefCon and I'd never sell it anyway," Moss told eWeek.

From Homeland Security to ICANN

In June 2009, Moss was one of 16 people sworn onto the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which advises the secretary of Homeland Security directly. He said he was "fantastically honored and excited to contribute," and conceded that the seat gave him an unfair advantage in Spot the Fed.

Not everyone saw it coming. "I'm surprised to see Jeff on the list," Kevin Mitnick told CNET.

Two years later, on April 28, 2011, ICANN, the nonprofit that coordinates the internet's domain name system, named Moss its vice president and chief security officer. "I can think of no one with a greater understanding of the security threats facing Internet users and how best to defend against them," said ICANN chief Rod Beckstrom.

Moss started in ICANN's Washington office the next day and stayed through the end of 2013. The years since have brought a fellowship at the Atlantic Council, a life membership of the Council on Foreign Relations and, from 2016, a board seat at Richemont, the Swiss luxury group behind Cartier.

A Time-Out for the Feds

The summer of 2013 tested DEF CON's open-door tradition. In July, weeks after the first Snowden stories broke, Moss wrote that "recent revelations have made many in the community uncomfortable" and that it'd be best for everyone if the feds called a "time-out" and skipped that year's conference.

The press read it as a ban. DEF CON's own news page pushed back: "Nowhere in DT's statement did he ban anyone from attending." He was, it explained, "asking politely for feds to consider not attending this year."

Anyone attending on their own dime out of a personal interest in hacking, the note added, shouldn't consider themselves a fed. "We want motivated people to attend!"

Voting Machines, Beijing and Safe Mode

DEF CON 25 in 2017 introduced the Voting Village, where attendees got their hands on real election equipment. Within weeks, Virginia's State Board of Elections decertified its touchscreen voting machines ahead of the governor's race, citing the discoveries at DEF CON among its reasons.

In May 2018, Moss took the show on the road for the first time: DEF CON China [Beta] at a Beijing hotel, followed by DEF CON China 1.0 in 2019. When the pandemic hit in 2020, DEF CON 28 ran entirely online as "Safe Mode," the conference's first virtual event.

Washington kept calling. In December 2021, CISA named Moss, listed as president of DEF CON Communications, to its new Cybersecurity Advisory Committee alongside Mandiant's Kevin Mandia and Cloudflare's Matthew Prince. In October 2022 he became an inaugural member of the UK government's cyber advisory board.

Canceled, Then Un-Canceled

In February 2024, Caesars Entertainment abruptly terminated its contract with DEF CON after a 25-year relationship, leaving the conference with no venue and about seven months to go.

"We don't know why Caesars canceled us," Moss wrote on the DEF CON forums. "They won't say beyond it being a strategy change." A no-notice cancellation like that, he added, "is unheard of in the conference business."

A venue strike team flew to Las Vegas and walked floors. DEF CON 32 went ahead on its original dates, August 8 to 11, 2024, at the Las Vegas Convention Center, with workshops at the Sahara and, Moss promised, "the largest indoor venue LCD wall in the country."

Franklin and the Water Towns

Moss's newest project points the DEF CON crowd at the least glamorous targets in America: small water utilities. With Jake Braun, a former acting principal deputy national cyber director at the White House, he set up DEF CON Franklin to match volunteer hackers with the people who run critical infrastructure, starting with water through a partnership with the National Rural Water Association.

The urgency came from Volt Typhoon, the Chinese group US officials say has been pre-positioning inside American utilities. By November 2024 six utilities had signed on, and companies such as Cloudflare and Dragos began donating tools, as NPR reported in 2025.

At DEF CON 34, held August 6 to 9, 2026, Franklin launched a Water Watch Center to share threat intelligence across utilities. The conference itself handed out a badge built on what was billed as the first production-scale open-source silicon chip, and banned recording-capable smart glasses.

Jeff Moss: Still Hosting the Party

The hacker who faxed the Secret Service an invitation in 1993 has spent the three decades since being invited inside: Homeland Security, ICANN, CISA, the White House's cyber office and the UK's cyber advisory board.

He still runs DEF CON as the Dark Tangent, still posts his PGP fingerprints on the conference site, and now has volunteer hackers helping small-town water systems.

The going-away party never ended. It just got a lot bigger.