The Specialists

I am at Black Hat Europe this week - Helping to create a series of short online videos about the "deep-geek" community that is Black Hat. This institution has a set of values and a language all its own, along with a membership made up of fascinating experts and borderline conspiracy theorists, each with a cracking story to tell.  From missile sites protecting the Olympics, to the hacking of Obama's Blackberry. 

You can tell they don't get out much - and I mean that in a good way. They are the guys and girls who really dig in. Who really do the work and put in the hours so that we can all be safe either buying things online, or saving our family pictures to the cloud, or chatting with our loved ones on Facebook.  I'm sort of glad that they seem shy, reserved and self conscious. That kind of knowledge and talent doesn't need to be cocky about it at all.

The surprising thing was the respect they had for my pet subject - Info-security awareness among employees - at some point the conversations, however tech based, came down to human bahaviour. In fact one interviewee said that if we were starting out again in this business, he'd get a degree in psychology before he went down the programming/coding route.

Even in this bastion of binary brilliance, it seems human beings cause the most pain.

Look out for our films in a week or so via http://www.j4vv4d.com/, and http://www.infosecisland.com/