Drupal Represents at Defcon

Las Vegas casino magnet Steve Wynn was rumored to say that Defcon was “a dangerous and chaotic mess” that will “never set foot in one of my hotels again”. I guess his comments are understandable. During one conference the attendees reprogrammed Wynn’s hotel elevators to stop on every floor and rerouted the pay per view channel to the casino’s internal CCTV. Oh well, he probably said the same thing about Britney Spears after kicking her out of his hotel.

While Josh was out wowing the liberal bloggers this year, I was in Las Vegas with a good mix of 6000 reverse engineers, computer security professionals, federal agents, academics, and freelance hackers. There were solid talks about intellectual property law, the Tor Project, cool WIFI tricks, and other cool topics. Plus, lockpicking and WIFI villages and a couple off the hook parties.

At such a cool, security focused event it was no surprise that Drupal made an apperance. Outside of the peer to peer praise received when I introduced myself as doing Drupal development, the internal conference Defcon TV system (dctv.defcon.org), set up by RantMedia, was running Drupal. If you consider Drupal’s track record for vulnerabilities against other CMS systems you can see why. Especially with the latest security release of Drupal 5.2, the robust Security Team and the policy of full disclosure, Drupal is poised to be the “most secure CMS”.