http://www.csoonline.com/article/2597936/security-leadership/the-black-hat-evolution.html By Ira Winkler CSO Aug 26, 2014 When the Black Hat conference moved to the Mandalay Bay hotel, I was curious as to what would be different. Over the years, Black Hat has evolved into something very different than how it started. Whether it has been a good or bad evolution depends on your perspective. As background, I have the honor of being the first keynote speaker at the first Black Hat conference. The original event was an add on to the Defcon conference. At the time, Back Hat was the idea of one of the Jeff Moss’ friends who noticed that more and more corporate people were attending Defcon. The thought was to put on a more upscale event with similar content, and without the havoc of Defcon. The first year, at the soon to demolished Aladdin hotel, held all attendees in a relatively small conference room that sat less than 100 people. The most memorable session, of course except for my own, involved hackers talking about how they had no guilt in releasing vulnerabilities. Those vulnerabilities inevitably caused damages, not to the vendors of the products, but to the end users of the systems who were left unprepared to fix the vulnerabilities, before suffering an inevitable attack. Over the next few years, the Black Hat hype grew, which continued to grow Black Hat attendance. Through those years, I tended to speak on Social Engineering and related topics, and as such, I had packed audiences. Black Hat sessions tended to be on some highly technical subjects that the typical “suits”, looking very out of place, did not understand. […]