Jeff Moss (Dark Tangent)
termsecurityevents
The founder of DEF CON, which began in 1993 as a farewell party for a friend's bulletin-board network and became the largest hacker gathering in the world, and of Black Hat, its commercial sibling for the people who had to expense the trip.
Moss's real achievement was building an institution that the underground would still accept: DEF CON is deliberately cash-only at the door, structurally suspicious of surveillance, and run by unpaid Goons rather than an events company. He later served on the US Homeland Security Advisory Council and as ICANN's chief security officer, becoming the field's most credible translator between hackers and governments - the same bridge the L0pht walked into the Senate in 1998.
Also known as: dark tangent, dt, defcon founder