Hackers Convene in Las Vegas

L A S   V E G A S, July 28 -- The hacker attacks have begun.

Thousands of hackers — along with some federal agents and hangers-on — swarmed a hotel in Las Vegas today to collect T-shirts, socialize and trade tips on breaking into computers.

They’re at Defcon, the world’s biggest hacker convention, and, according to its organizers “a computer underground party for hackers.”

“There’s an interesting, very tight network here, a lot of people exchanging information, where the hacking community’s going,” said Neil Danoff, an information security expert with Motorola.

Defcon’s not the most technical conference; rather, it’s where hackers let their (long, multicolored) hair down and party.

“It’s where all the idiosyncrasies come out,” said Tim Lawless, a systems administrator at the University of Southern Mississippi.

The convention is being held at the Alexis Park hotel in Las Vegas through Sunday.

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This year has seen several sizeable computer-crime incidents, including denial-of-service attacks that hit prominent Web sites such as Yahoo! and CNN.com in February and the multibillion-dollar “Love Bug” virus attack that struck computers worldwide in May.

Last year at Defcon, the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow premiered “BackOrifice 2000,” a program that lets network administrators or system crackers gain control of machines running Windows 2000.

This year, with more and more companies reading employees’ e-mail and tracking their Web surfing, issues of privacy and anonymity are on the minds of Defcon speakers; several seminars address those topics. The hackers are also interested in the vulnerabilities of supposedly impregnable corporate firewalls.

Denial-of-service attacks, notably, are missing from the schedule: True hackers consider them an amateurish act of vandalism, not worth their time.

Because of the recent publicity, the hacker community has become skittish of anything involving DOS attacks, attendees said, whether it’s causing or curing them.