About Darknet-NG

The DarkNet was inspired by a community concept of the same name presented in Daniel Suarez's seminal books, "Daemon" and "Freedom."

In it, an autonomous artificial intelligence implemented by the visionary Matthew A. Sobol and activated by news of his death comes to "life" and begins recruiting people to embark on a mission that will change humanity forever.

Sobol foresaw a clash between those who would use technology to centralize power in an elite few and those who would use it to empower individuals to maintain their autonomy, power and rights in an increasingly complex world.

About The Contest

At DefCon, the DarkNet-NG team has come together to inspire the hacker and maker communities.

Our primary goals are to promote community efforts in learning new technology and promoting good information security practices.

We hold an event every year that challenges our agents to gather knowledge from all across the conference, from villages to other events to communities like DeafCon, and use it to compete for the top honor our community members can achieve.

Just as in Sobol's and Suarez's vision, the highest form of competition does not merely consist in excellent individual achievement, but the degree to which an agent can help and raise up her fellow agents.

About The People

Many, many people have helped to bring this vision to life. Some of them are listed here listed as Operatives

Current Operatives

Digital Tinker as you can guess from the name, Digital likes to experiment with a lot of technology but this breadth causes some of the knowledge to be somewhat shallow. However this oddball mix of knowledge comes in handy when tyring to bring it all together in weird and wacky ways.

Gater_Byte is our User Relations Lead/Community Manager/Evangelist. He runs the Holon.network site to help get people prepared for for DEFCON, and enjoys mentoring and teaching others about security. His focus is community outreach and how to help enable the growth of holons, temporary and permanent. He also likes taking long walks sipping on a long island iced tea, while wardriving.

Anyone who knows GuloGuloDesu will remark upon his inhuman height; but he has other fine attributes as well, not the least of which is his creation of some of the most clever, and some of the most bizarre, quests of the DarkNet. When he is in "mohawk mode," he is capable of both rocking out and performing feats of Kung Fu that would dazzle a casual observer.

Mansel, the only Operative with an entire Discord channel dedicated to himself (#satan), works on that elusive balance of “fun” and “challenging” as the lead of quest development. Nothing excites him more than to hear a triumphant “YOU ASSHOLE!” when one of his puzzles is solved; a nice bottle of tequila is a close second though. He does work you might be familiar with at a company you might have heard of. Or maybe not. Bring him a bottle of tequila and you might find out.

Sometimes seen stealthily and secretively searching to circumvent security services through subtle scanning, Silk ascertains suspect’s “secure” secrets somewhat suddenly through sensational subterfuge. Started solving and struggling, now selectively serving. Specializing in strategies to orchestrate the semantics and design of quests to systematically strain solvers seeking scoring by striving to surmise secret solutions through scrutiny. As well as soliciting social solidarity in a sensational resolution following solvers surveying a stupendous, perhaps superior, spectacular story seminal of Suarez’s series of Sobol’s final solution. This story summary seems somewhat suspiciously superfluous so at your service with a smile, simply call me, Silk. See Silk's sensational services at https://youtube.com/alexchaveriat.

As a youth, Gateherder would take apart broken clocks and VCRs "just to see how they worked". Decades later he would find his vocational calling in digital logic design (specifically field programmable gate arrays). Just like you, Gateherder began his Darknet career as an agent (Defcon23), finally leveling up to the mystical "operative" status four years later. He is quite social for an engineer, but it doesn't take long to realize that, in fact, he often doesn't actually get the joke.

McL0v1n is a chameleon. He can fit in and disappear into any situation, group, or setting. Known to change his appearance on the fly to avoid recognition or those hunting him. He's an expert with infrastructure and proponent of mesh networking technologies and encryption over all data.