This is a special tutorial write-up authored by Deja Security Consultant Atanas Kirilov, who built the CubCon 2018 badge.

CubCon was a brand-new event at DEF CON, developed with the intent to bring beginner and experienced hackers together and build up the community, as well as to pass along career tips and lessons learned the hard way.

I’m one of the four organizers who ran the event, and the purpose of this post is to illustrate how I helped plan it with the development of a challenge badge.

Deja vu Security’s staff hails from all over the world, and can do everything from hack your car to design buildings. One—a Security Consultant named Moriah Tobin—can operate a nuclear reactor.

“The skills developed by gaming could be arguably summarized as practice obsessing over digital problems. I think anyone who has seen both a hacker and a gamer obsessing over something can immediately understand the relationship. That ability to completely lose yourself in the problem is a valuable skill in the industry—partially because of the work ethic that comes from that obsession, and partially because of the comprehensive knowledge that type of person usually has in their domain.”

Deja vu Security Director of Operations Joe Restivo sits down with Deja Co-Founder and CEO Adam Cecchetti to get his take on the history and future of Deja’s organizational culture, especially in the context of a fast-growing company.