2025-08-04 –, Florentine A
The scene is dead! It was killed by sexual violence and big money. If you haven't paid attention to the hacker underground since you were a kid, we're going to talk about how the culture has changed in the past decade. As infosec became a profession and bug bounties became real, talent abandoned the underground in droves and the underground lost its monopoly on knowledge. The remnants increasingly turned to cybercrime. The final blow was the explosion in Bitcoin's price and they started to call themselves "The Com". This talk will explore the past decade of the hacking underground, and updates to our cultural assumptions. We will explore why there is so much overlap nowadays between cybercrime, fraud, sextortion, and nihilistic violent extremism, and my hope is to start a discussion on how to prevent the next generation from falling into it.
I've been researching English speaking cybercrime for most of my entire career, since long before they started to self-identify as "the com", and I'm going to discuss the patterns I noticed across more than a decade of work. This stuff has implications for child safety, infosec work, and the wellbeing of the next generation of workers in the infosec industry.
Allison has labored in obscurity chasing script kiddies since 2011. She is now the Chief Research Officer at Unit 221B, and works on intelligence collection and takedown efforts. She works with a team of amazing investigators who collaborate across industry and governments to create real world impacts and deterrence for threat actors.