Hacking is a superpower.
It allows you to control time, space, history, the future, now.
So this is the world championships of hacking.
Right here.
You realize all the things that are possible.
Both how you can break the world that you see.
But then how you make it into something better.
Hackers are the smartest, most creative, brilliant people in the world.
I think it's what kids should strive to be.
Because what you learn is that you can do anything.
I'm Nico Sell, founder and chairman of the Wickr Foundation.
The Wickr Foundation's mission is to advance the private web.
No one wants to think about privacy and security.
We need to make it easy. That's our job.
And we try to get hackers on our side, so we can keep the internet safe.
The word hacker has gone through quite an interesting evolution over the years.
When Steve Levey first wrote about hackers, he was talking about people
that were able to create, break, and make things in a new way to make the world better.
Criminals kind of hijacked the term hacker for a little while,
but it's been one of my big missions to bring back that term as what it really is.
It's the most powerful tool set and skill for the future of the world.
And a hacker can use those skills for good or for bad.
Def Con is the largest hacker gathering in the world.
My role at Def Con was really bridging the gap between hackers and feds,
hackers and business people,
and really making the name hacker good again.
So this is the car-hacking village. And you can hands-on hack these things.
Whenever you see hackers pull off a certain industry like they did with hacking cars,
the real lesson for us to all learn is that if we're going to put our bodies
in the middle of computers going a hundred miles an hour down the road,
we need to start thinking about security now.
And hackers at least in zero days are vital in making that happen.
So a zero day is a flaw in a piece of software or hardware
that the vendor doesn't know of and, therefore, hasn't fixed.
A zero day mixed with an exploit is a cyber weapon.
China appears to have a new cyber weapon at their disposal.
A series of cyber attacks today agains the internet.
Whenever you see a hacker releasing zero days at Def Con, they're our hero.
Instead of selling it on the black market for millions of dollars,
they've decided to give their research away for free to make the world a better place.
And the more hackers that can bring zero days forward,
is how we keep the internet safe.
Something that I've seen over the years
is that one generation to a next, overcorrects from the one before.
Hacking has gone mainstream.
And you know what? The kids love it.
My daughters have been lucky enough to grow up with hackers their entire life,
and go to DEFCON with me and meet all these amazing geniuses.
I want to learn how to hardware hack!
And I was like I bet you're not the only one that wants to learn this.
I'm the founder of DEFCON kids, which is now called Rootz Asylum.
We teach the kids how to hack.
And we're able to do that at DEFCON
because all the best hackers in the world are already there,
and we can bring them them to the kids.
The internet itself was built on this amazing foundation of trust and openness
and as we teach these kids how to break into the power grid,
and roller coasters and your cell phone and facebook,
they understand how much power there is.
We teach the kids an honor code,
and part of that is what we all learned from Spider-Man:
with great power comes great responsibility.
And I think that's an important lesson for all of us.
Hacking is the most important skill set for the future of the world,
and who recruits the best hackers...wins.