Want to attend Summercon 2025 for free? Step up. Pitch in.
Would you like to know more?
Volunteering isn’t just an honor—it’s how the show runs. Join the Volunteer Corps and earn your place on the front lines of America’s oldest hacker conference.
Mission Briefing: Volunteer Roles
“The bugs are inside the firewall. We’re deploying countermeasures.”
Volunteers are assigned to critical support operations, including:
ID verification and badge scanning
Cable deployment & field logistics
Speaker escort and green room security
Merch & T-shirt distribution operations
AV ops and comms monitoring
Crowd flow & line integrity enforcement
Afterparty support (DJ liaison, door ops, hydration logistics)
Everyone rotates. Nobody gets stuck. The Captain will debrief you daily.
Rewards for Service
Volunteers receive:
Full admission to Summercon 2025
Access to the green room and volunteer HQ
A limited-edition Volunteer Corps shirt
Snacks, drinks, and situational awareness
Eternal glory in the eyes of your peers
“Would you like to know more?”
Deployment Qualifications
We’re seeking candidates who:
Report on time and follow mission orders
Maintain morale under pressure
Are comfortable lifting, moving, scanning, or yelling (lightly)
Can serve 1–2 shifts (~3–4 hours each) over the course of the con
Are prepared for unexpected bugs—both literal and metaphorical
Experience not required. We’ll train you in the field.
Operation Timeline
Pre-Con Prep: Thursday, July 10
Main Engagement: Friday–Saturday, July 11–12
You’ll serve up to 8 hours across the weekend—plenty of time left to attend talks, party, and conspire
Enlistment Protocol
“Enlist now, and secure your place in hacker history.”
Use our Google Form Deadline to apply: June 10, 2025 Confirmations sent: June 20, 2025
Questions?
Report [email protected] For field chatter: DM us @summerc0n on Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky.
Hall of Heroes
These brave volunteers answered the call. Will you?
Wow, Such Tariff
STOP CODE: CRITICAL_TARIFF 0xFEE12025
Your 401k ran into retaliatory tariffs and is plummeting in value. We’ve all been there.
When global markets crash and supply chains seize, we don’t panic—we patch.
At Summercon, we’ve been quietly preparing for this kind of systemic weirdness since 1987. We’ve explored the limits of trust, the implications of regulation, and the beautiful horror of what happens when “the system” works exactly as designed.
RECENT SYSTEM WARNINGS
🛠 The Debugging Uncertainty Principle Jatin Kataria, 2023 Why your observations might be the problem—and the patch.
🧨 Da Bomb: Beyond Insanity Steve Myrick, 2024 From physics to policy, how we keep handing over red buttons.
🌐 Chinese Discourse Power Martin Wendiggensen, 2024 Narrative control, infrastructure alignment, and geopolitical side channels.
🗳 Zero Trust, Now We Must—But What It Means? Harri Hursti, 2022 Trust models as post-crash survival tools.
🔥 Wassenaar You Serious? Katie Moussouris & Ryan Naraine, 2020 Exploit regulation, export control, and laughing through the red tape.
🧠 That Intimate Talk About Responsibly Hacking Your Govt Mudge, 2016 No comment.
These aren’t just talks. They’re field notes for surviving systems built without failsafes.
If you’ve reached this page because you saw a Blue Screen of Domestic Exploits—don’t worry. You’re already rebooting.
JOIN US FOR THE FIX
🗓 July 11–12, 2025 📍 Brooklyn, NY 🎟 Tickets 📡 #scon2025
Summercon: Supporting domestic 0day development since 1987.
OUR CODE OF CONDUCT
CODE OF CONDUCT
It’s been a few years since our last update, and a lot has changed. The world isn’t as isolated as it was in 2021, but we’re still mindful that community spaces work best when everyone is clear about the expectations. Since some folks might be joining us for the first time (or the first time in a while), here’s a quick reminder of our Code of Conduct.
Many years ago, Summercon published its first real Code of Conduct. That was kind of a landmark, since the Summercon team has always prided itself on a certain amount of constructive chaos. That early code looked like this:
If you love anarchy, want to break things, set off fire alarms, or generally behave like a twelve-year-old, you probably should stay away—even if you are a twelve-year-old. Especially if you are a twelve-year-old. It’s not that kind of event, and we’re not those kind of people. Even though we’re a group of hackers, breaking the law is still illegal.
If you’re interested in meeting your peers in the security world, connecting with some of the finest people you’ll ever know, putting names to faces, and learning about the latest trends in security analysis, we’d love to see you. Mingle, socialize, make lifelong friendships. That’s what we’re all about.
We still believe in that.
But the world has grown. And while we still love that constructive chaos, we’ve grown a lot too. We want everyone to have a good time. And because not everyone agrees on what that means, we’ll be very clear:
Summercon is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of race, color, national origin, religion, age, sex, gender, sexual orientation, or disability. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for conference talks or exhibitors. The conference reserves the right to eject anyone who engages in behavior that is threatening or patently offensive to the community, regardless of whether it occurs at the conference venue, parties, or online.
Conference participants violating our rules may be thrown out of the conference without a refund at the discretion of the conference organizers.
If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact a member of the conference staff immediately. Anyone wearing a red Summercon Staff shirt is empowered to intervene.
In case you don’t feel comfortable approaching a staff member, you can call us at 720-586-4225 (720-586-HACK) to speak directly with the organizers.
TL;DR: Legal says we’ve gotta say it, so here it is: We reserve the right to remove anyone, anytime, for any reason. No drama, no debate, no refunds, no takebacks. Don’t test us.
Thanks for sticking with us. We know vibes matter, and it’s just easier for everyone to enjoy themselves when the expectations are clear. Play nice, stay weird, and have fun!
WHAT MAKES A GREAT SUMMERCON PRESENTATION?
With the opening of the Summercon 2025 CFP, here are a few friendly tips for what makes a great Summercon presentation. These seven points represent the kinds of things that we are evaluating when we look at CFP proposals.
Technical
While we occasionally incorporate talks of a non-technical nature, almost every presentation that shows up at Summercon is deeply technical. They’re not sales pitches, and they’re not about righting societal wrongs. So if you’re planning on submitting a talk about why people should buy your company’s particular security snake oil, or why your company has the best culture (and you can too!), you’ll have more success somewhere else.
Novel
From time to time, in the interest of getting important content in front of the best audience in the world, we let people present something they’ve already shown at events of lesser stature. But we prefer totally new presentations instead of rehashed talks. New content has a better chance of getting shown on the Summercon stage.
Irreverent
While the presentations are technical, successful Summercon presentations get their point across is through non-traditional means. This is not the place to read slides. One memorable presentation used an Android-shaped piñata as a prop. Another invited participation through an AA-meeting style format. The sky’s the limit (within the limits of our code of conduct, of course).
Revels in the Journey
If you like talking about the trials and tribulations of research, we are all ears. Even though your final results may be super polished and look effortless, everyone knows you had at least three major setbacks and went down two totally worthless paths before you arrived at a good solution. Share those. People love that, especially our speaker selection committee.
Sticks it to The Man
Despite all the sponsorships, corporate attendance, and more buttoned-up nature of Summercon (see our Code of Conduct, which is totally reasonable, by the way), we are still, at heart, a hacker conference. Challenge authority. Show you’re not a patsy for The Man. Fight the Power.
Engages the Audience
Summercon speakers are a special breed, because Summercon attendees are a special breed. Prepare to have people call out your mistakes, heckle if you’re less than prepared, and generally push your buttons. Successful presentations channel this misplaced audience enthusiasm. We still fondly recall a choose-your-own-adventure presentation, where randomly selected audience members got to dictate the direction of the talk. Engage your audience, and they won’t turn on you. (This can be good life advice, too.)
Fits into the Allocated Time
We cannot overstate this: fill the time, generally 45 minutes of speaking with 10 minutes of Q&A. Our speaker selection committee has been around the block, so if you’re going to try to pretend that a six hour seminar fits into 55 minutes of speaking slot, it’s probably not going to get selected.
We look forward to your submission!
sponsors sidebar 2025
Research Grant Sponsors
Platinum Sponsors
Gold Sponsors
Silver Sponsors
Supporter Sponsors
SPONSORS
Platinum Sponsors
Atredis Partners is a research-driven Information Security consultancy. We deliver advanced penetration testing, embedded security research, and cutting edge risk management. Our team is made up of some of the most respected hackers in the information security industry, and we thrive on hacking complicated targets, on time and under budget. Our HQ also happens to be in the birth city of SummerCon, but we’re pretty sure the Best Western in North Saint Louis burned down years ago.
Gold Sponsors
Etsy is the global marketplace for unique and creative goods. We build, power, and evolve the tools and technologies that connect millions of entrepreneurs with millions of buyers around the world. As an Etsy Inc. employee, whether a team member of Etsy, Reverb, or Depop, you will tackle unique, meaningful, and large-scale problems alongside passionate coworkers, all the while making a rewarding impact and Keeping Commerce Human.
Flatiron Health is a healthtech company expanding the possibilities for point of care solutions in oncology and using data for good to power smarter care for every person with cancer. Through machine learning and AI, real-world evidence, and breakthroughs in clinical trials, we continue to transform patients’ real-life experiences into knowledge and create a more modern, connected oncology ecosystem. Flatiron Health is an independent affiliate of the Roche Group.
Silver Sponsors
RED BALLOON SECURITY was founded by Dr. Ang Cui out of Columbia University’s Intrusion Detection Systems Lab in 2011 with its pioneering technology, Symbiote Defense. Today, its R&D has expanded to a team of world-class researchers and developers who continue to publish seminal research papers on embedded security and intrusion detection. Since its inception, the team at Red Balloon has partnered with the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security, performing on funded research activities and deploying its defensive technologies on a range of critical embedded systems. The company has also ethically disclosed vulnerabilities in hundreds of millions of embedded devices and continues to advance the state of embedded device security as part of its mission.
Supporter Sponsors
Bishop Fox is the largest private professional services firm focused on offensive security testing. Since 2005, the firm has provided security consulting services to the world’s leading organizations — working with over 25% of the Fortune 100 — to help secure their products, applications, networks, and cloud with penetration testing and security assessments. The company is headquartered in Phoenix, AZ and has offices in Atlanta, GA; San Francisco, CA; New York, NY; and Barcelona, Spain.
The Phosphorus Unified xIoT Security Management Platform is the industry’s only CPS Protection Platform proactively covering the entire security and management lifecycle for xIoT. Through its unique ability to directly communicate with over one million device models (including over 600 vendors) in their native languages, Phosphorus’ platform empowers all organizations to safely discover, remediate, monitor, and manage any IoT, OT, IIoT, and IoMT device, including the most sensitive mission-critical and life-critical assets. It fully automates the remediation of the biggest xIoT device vulnerabilities – including unknown and inaccurate asset inventory, default credentials, out-of-date and vulnerable firmware, risky configurations, banned and end-of-life devices, and expired or self-signed certificates.
645 Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that partners with exceptional founders who are building iconic companies. We invest at the Seed and Series A stages and leverage our Voyager software platform to enable our Success team and Connected Network to help founders scale to the growth stage. 645 has $550m+ in AUM across 5 funds, and is growing fast with backing from leading institutional investors, including university endowments, funds of funds, and pension funds. The firm has offices in New York and SF, and you can learn more at www.645ventures.com.
Presentations
2025
The Lineup
check back soon 2025…
Important people
gathering the people 2025
SUMMERCON 2025 – Dates, Tickets
As we said during the closing ceremonies of Summercon 2024, Summercon 2025 is July 11 – July 12, 2025, once again at Littlefield in Brooklyn, NY. We have a block of early bird tickets available.