The HacKid Conference: A kid-friendly idea whose time has come

By Bill Brenner
Senior Editor
CSO
May 06, 2010

I go to a lot of security conferences, almost always without my family in tow. The logistics and money involved with trekking them from one part of the country to the next is usually beyond my resources. But when a conference is local and there's something in it for the kids, I'm in
100 percent.

Last month's SOURCE Boston and Security B-Sides conferences coincided with school vacation, which put me in a bind. Fortunately, the security community is very kid-friendly, and nobody minded when I brought Sean and Duncan to B-Sides. In fact, I think the hackers enjoyed their antics.

At B-Sides one of the first speakers was a young security practitioner talking about the challenges of people his age breaking into the industry and finding the right combination of employment and respect.
While I was getting inspired to write "How young upstarts can get their big security break in 6 steps" during that talk, Cisco cloud security guru Chris Hoff was getting a blast of inspiration from his children's adventures at SOURCE a couple days before. The result is a concept any security practitioner-parent should embrace.

On the HacKid Conference website, Hoff explains the idea:

"The gist of the idea for HacKid (sounds like 'hacked,' get it) came about when I took my three daughters aged 6, 9 and 14 along with me to the Source Security conference in Boston. It was fantastic to have them engage with my friends, colleagues and audience members as well as ask all sorts of interesting questions regarding the conference. It was especially gratifying to have them in the audience when I spoke twice.
There were times the iPad I gave them was more interesting, however."

The idea is to provide an interactive, hands-on experience for kids and their parents which includes things like:

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