Zardus

Hello hackers! In case you missed it at @defcon: @perribus, @adamdoupe, @the_robwaz, @TheConnorNelson, @thedarktangent and I announced @DEFCONAcademy! I kept meaning to spread the word, and now that there's hype (https://news.asu.edu/20241031-science-and-technology-def-con-academy-looks-serve-build-community), it's time for the thread!

Read on! 🧵

DEF CON Academy looks to serve, build community | ASU News

Every year, a legion of hackers, programmers, cybersecurity professionals and researchers descend on Las Vegas for the most storied convention in the hacker community: DEF CON.

Nov 1, 2024 at 4:44pmWeb
Show threadZardusNov 1, 2024
DEFCON Academy will be a part of @defcon tailored to help people new to hacking build up practical cybersecurity skills. The goal is to take on some of the very-early to later-stage education burden, making the DEFCON community better suited to approach the rest of the con.
Show threadZardusNov 1, 2024
We based @DEFCONAcademy on our experiences learning, teaching, and breathing Hacking. @defcon, of course, is the nexus of this, and many a hacker come yearly to learn and live hacking for a weekend. But how do we maximize the utility of this learning, or sustain it year-round?
Show threadZardusNov 1, 2024
In a few ways: curate educational material for the community, support DEFCON newcomers to tackle this material, provide paths to apply what they learn, and recognize efforts of learners & teachers! We'll start with minimal POCs for each of these: a sort of "@DEFCONAcademy Beta".
Show threadZardusNov 1, 2024
Our minimum POC for the educational material is @ASU's @pwncollege, our platform to learn cybersecurity through hands-on, guided challenges. Again, we want to scale further (to other awesome platforms) as we go beyond the beta, but this gives us a familiar platform to start with.
Show threadZardusNov 1, 2024
To support the DEFCON community to tackle our material, we'll leverage education research we've done at @ASU and roll up to DEFCON with an army of Academy "Professors" who will help people learn through material as basic as "how to Linux" and as complex as "how to pwn kernels".
Show threadZardusNov 1, 2024
We're building paths to apply learned material by working with top Capture the Flag teams to mentor top DEFCON Academy students through tough CTFs. These are a great way to get from "know" to "do", and we'll be scaling this out to more teams and more events in the near future!
Show threadZardusNov 1, 2024

And, finally, we have huge plans to recognize and encourage the community. I'll leave this for later announcements, but there are some exciting things coming down the pipeline!

Hope to see everyone at @DEFCONAcademy (beta) next @defcon!

Show threadMathias PayerNov 2, 2024
@Zardus hey, your threading is a bit broken. Why don't you use the longer posts on mastodon? 😅
Show threadZardusNov 2, 2024

@gannimo I really enjoy threads! Long-form posts are lame, IMO, but I realize that this is a bizarre opinion.

At any rate, the thread in question cross-posted to mastodon, twitter, and bluesky via fedica, so the handles are typically broken unless I go and manually fix them. Unfortunately, I think mastodon missed the boat on taking over from twitter, so cross-posting remains necessary :-(

Show threadMathias PayerNov 2, 2024
@Zardus same here regarding threads but the order is broken on mastodon. Also looks like all social platforms imploded, I don't see a single alternative that works. At least Twitter seems to be dying, so at least one option that will go away soon 🤣