DEFCON 32 BRIEFING

10 YEARS?!

This was a special year for the DDV - this was our 10th anniversary of duplicating data and getting it out the door to the community! It’s hard to believe but, yes, 10 years ago back in 2014, Bruiser and Lil’ Roo started up the first Data Duplication Village in a corner of the Rio Convention Center. Two years later KnightOwl and Yoke took over and we’ve continued to grow and expand!

This year, we added new source options, had larger drive sizes, used the DefCon discord server for drive status tracking, had dedicated 'drive valet' tickets, t-shirts available for purchase, teamed up with DC Next Gen to have some activities for the kids, and generally made a mess of things. We also had over 550 drives accepted along with more than a few challenges in taking care of business this year - more on that in a minute.

We also had a reasonably successful online t-shirt fundraiser through CustomInk that brought in about $250 that we’ll use to help keep things running.

Huge thanks to DT and Lys for the addition of the NTLM-9 tables and the VX-Underground archive (along with a few hundred gigs of cat pictures). Those two sources were both 8TB sources and hugely popular.

 
 

General INFO

DC32-DDV at night

DC32 DDV at night

Our volunteers kicked ass this year! We had a great team ready to set everything up but didn’t even have power until 10 minutes before our 4:00 opening time!

Once we got started, we took in over 400 drives within two hours! We had a new ticketing process which provided a HUGE step in efficiency for our intake. We didn’t realize it until we cut off the intake on Friday morning but we’d already taken in all of the drives we were able to process on Thursday - we’ll pay closer attention next time!

We had a higher than normal number of people who didn’t pick up their drives before the 11:00am deadline on Sunday (you know who you are). If this was intentional, thank you and we’ll use those for new source drives next year. If this wasn’t intentional, reach out to us (contact information below) and we’ll see what we can do to return them to you.

 

DC Next Gen

This year, we also had an amazing addition of our collaboration with DC Next Gen. We setup three challenges for kids of any age to come in and have some fun:

DC32 - DC Next Gen Hard Drive Deconstruction

Hard Drive Deconstruction

Our volunteers brought in about 20 old hard drives of various types and sizes and donated them to the village for this activity. We also provided some basic tools and helped people disassemble hard drive to see what makes them tick on the inside! This was SOOOO much fun!

We also provided a one-sheet showing the names of the various components. It was really good to see people figuring out the different screw types, sizes and, if they were paying attention, find the super-strong magnets that live in the hard drives.

Encryption Challenge: Caesar Ciphers

A great introduction to encryption, this was was fun for all ages! With some easy cut-out Caesar wheels, we walked through a couple of increasingly hard exercises to show how even symmetric encryption can be effective if applied properly. We’re especially proud that we were able to stump the AI participant - at least for a while. All of the participants who made it through this challenge, were richly rewarded with a customized DDV Champion award!

DC32 - DC Next Gen Binary Bracelets

Binary Bracelets

At this point, we should all know that data is stored on these magnetic sensitive disks in binary form. We took this one step further and provided everything needed store your initials or name in the same way; in binary on a bracelet or necklace!

As you can imagine, these could get quite long but we had enough string and beads for everyone. This is definitely something we’ll make available for next year too.

 

DC Discord and Drive Valet Tickets

Given that this was our 10th anniversary, we wanted to go big on improving our drive intake, handling, tracking, and human notifications. We worked for months to build a process and make custom valet tickets for DC32. The tickets incorporated the information that everyone should know about village hours, serialized ticket numbers for sorting and finding drives as well as unique codes that can be used within the Def Con discord to provide notifications as drives move through the duplication process.

DC32 DDV Drive Valet Ticket

As an added (not very useful) bonus, each ticket also points to somewhere in the world via the ///what.three.words app.

Big thanks go out to the Def Con Discord Ops team and especially Voltage Spike who helped us by making the bot that connects the drive tickets to your Discord account so that you could get your drive status at any time - and get an automatic notification when your drive was ready to be picked up!

We came away with even more improvements for next year. Look for more integrations like this in the future with other Def Con villages too!

 

Drive REQUESTS

As mentioned before, we took in over 400 drives within two hours and by the time we cut off our intake, we had 568 drives in the village! With 5 different source drives to choose from, we were carefully tracking which ones were being requested. As expected, our most popular source request was for the new VX Underground Archive.

Here’s the breakdown of our 2024 intake:

  • A) Infocon.org Archive 160

  • B) Rainbow tables 1 of 3 72

  • C) Rainbow tables 2 of 3 72

  • D) VX Underground Archive 165

  • E) Rainbow tables 3 of 3 99

DDV Drive content requests

DC32 - DDV Hardware Surgery

DDV Surgery

The Crew tries to fix a duplicator that isn’t working correctly.

We were able to process about 350 drive in total this year. We did have some system failures and that put us behind our target output this year. We don’t have exact numbers of duplications complete as there were so many we couldn’t get to but we continue to review our logs. Hope to see an update here soon.

 

DRIVE DETAILS

As we do every year, we catalog the brand and model of each drive we receive.  We were received 566 drives this year.  This gives us a small but statistically viable sample of manufacturer information to share:

Intake by Manufacturer

 

DRIVE FAILURES

Other than the hardware failures, we saw some higher than normal failures by manufacturer this year. There were only about 12 drive copy failures - many of which we were unable to overcome due to time constraints. Most notably, we saw more failures than usual with Seagate (2.9%) and Dell remains a failure leader with a 25% failure rate this year. We’re still seeing several returning drives so it’s reasonable to see that we’re seeing an increase in failures due to drives starting to age.

We didn’t see any additional SSD’s this year which means that Samsung SSD is the only drive type with a 0% failure rate for the village thus far. All the details can be found below:

DRIVE Statistics

MANUFACTURER                  INTAKE                   FAILURES
       Type           %       6TB    8TB    Total      Fails    % of Fails    % of MFG
-------------------------     --------------------     --------------------------------
Toshiba             9.5%       18     36      54         0       0.0%          0.0%
    X300            4.2%        9     15      24         0       0.0%          0.0%
    N300            4.1%        6     17      43         0       0.0%          0.0%
    S300            1.2%        3      4       7         0       0.0%          0.0%
Seagate            48.4%       13    261     274         8      66.7%          2.9%
    Barracuda      13.1%        0     74      74         6      50.0%          8.1%
    BarracudaPro    3.4%        3     16      19         0       0.0%          0.0%
    Ironwolf       18.2%        6     97     103         1       8.3%          1.0%
    IronwolfPro     2.3%        0     13      13         0       0.0%          0.0%
    Enterprise      0.4%        0      2       2         0       0.0%          0.0%
    EXOS            9.4%        1     52      53         1       8.3%          1.9%
    Firecuda        0.2%        0      1       1         0       0.0%          0.0%
    Terascale       0.9%        0      5       5         0       0.0%          0.0%
    Compute         0.5%        3      0       3         0       0.0%          0.0%
    Archive         0.2%        0      1       1         0       0.0%          0.0%
Western Digital    28.3%       29    131     160         2      16.7%          1.3%
    Black           5.7%       20     12      32         0       0.0%          0.0%
    Gold            0.5%        1      2       3         0       0.0%          0.0%
    Purple          1.1%        0      6       6         0       0.0%          0.0%
    Yellow (AE)     0.0%        0      0       0         0       0.0%          0.0%
    Red            11.0%        5     57      62         0       0.0%          0.0%
    Red (Pro)       1.2%        1      6       7         1       8.3%         14.3%
    Blue            3.4%        1     18      19         1       8.3%          5.3%
    Green           0.2%        1      0       1         0       0.0%          0.0%
    White/EMAZ      5.3%        0     30      30         0       0.0%          0.0%
HGST All            9.5%        1     53      54         0       0.0%          0.0%
    Ultrastar       0.9%        0      5       5         0       0.0%          0.0%
    White/Deskstar  8.7%        1     48      49         0       0.0%          0.0%
Dell All            0.7%        0      4       4         1       8.3%         25.0%
MDD (Max)           3.5%        0     20      20         1       8.3%          5.0%
    Enterprise      3.4%        0     19      19         1       8.3%          5.3%
    Surveillance    0.2%        0      1       1         0       0.0%          0.0%
 

SSD
Samsung 870QVO     0.0%         0      0       0         0       0.0%          0.0%

 

Wrap up

For DC32 we were able to push a disappointing 2.3 Petabytes of data out the door to attendees. It was a nice, relaxing, and safe year - so far, no reports of village COVID, and the overall process went smoothly. We’ve already started working on the improvements for next year - especially getting in some new equipment. We’ve already received one new duplicator and are looking for more!

Remember, if you're one of those who wasn't able to get a drive in to us, all the content is also available through torrents via Infocon.org. If you have the bandwidth, please seed them too!

Big thanks to DT, Nikita, Hony, Paydreaux, Voltage Spike, the QM Stores team, Con Goons, and especially all of our volunteers for helping make DDV such a success this year!

See you at DC33!