Malicious Life Podcast: History of the THOTCON Hacking Conference

THOTCON is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill security conference, and it's obvious from the moment you browse their website. How did a local, small-scale event in Chicago grow to become a major cybersecurity conference? What is its connection to The Matrix movie?

Producer Eliad Kimhy talks to Nick Percoco and Jonathan Tomek, two of THOTCON's founders - check it out…

Nick Percoco
About the Guest

Nick Percoco

Chief Security Officer at Kraken Digital Asset Exchange

With more than 23 years of information security experience, Nicholas was recently the Chief Security Officer at Uptake. In 2011, SC Magazine named Percoco Security Researcher of the Year. 

In addition, he was inducted into the inaugural class of the Illinois State University College of Applied Science & Technology Academy of Achievement. Percoco is the creator of THOTCON (a hacking conference held in Chicago each year), & co-founder of The Cavalry movement.

Jonathan Tomek
About the Guest

Jonathan Tomek

Founder @MadX

Researcher, Nerd, Marine. Cyber Threat Analyst... Jonathan’s forte is in threat intelligence, network forensics, incident handling, and malware analysis in the Information Security realm.

Jonathan has been featured in articles appearing in SC Magazine and Star and Stripes, presented at SANS Incident Response in Washington DC, the NetWitness 2010 user conference, GFIRST 2011, and many other security events throughout the country

ran-levi-headshot
About the Host

Ran Levi

Born in Israel in 1975, Malicious Life Podcast host Ran studied Electrical Engineering at the Technion Institute of Technology, and worked as an electronics engineer and programmer for several High Tech companies in Israel.

In 2007, created the popular Israeli podcast Making History. He is author of three books (all in Hebrew): Perpetuum Mobile: About the history of Perpetual Motion Machines; The Little University of Science: A book about all of Science (well, the important bits, anyway) in bite-sized chunks; Battle of Minds: About the history of computer malware.

About The Malicious Life Podcast

Malicious Life by Cybereason exposes the human and financial powers operating under the surface that make cybercrime what it is today. Malicious Life explores the people and the stories behind the cybersecurity industry and its evolution. Host Ran Levi interviews hackers and industry experts, discussing the hacking culture of the 1970s and 80s, the subsequent rise of viruses in the 1990s and today’s advanced cyber threats.

Malicious Life theme music: ‘Circuits’ by TKMusic, licensed under Creative Commons License. Malicious Life podcast is sponsored and produced by Cybereason. Subscribe and listen on your favorite platform:

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