DEFCON 33 BRIEFING
An amazing year! This year, we were able to expand the village with more duplicators, the DefCon discord drive status tracking, merch available for online purchase, DC Next Gen activities for the kids, and we rocked the house! We had over 550 drives accepted and completely took care of business this year!
General INFO
Our volunteers were awesome! We had a really short pack in this year but the team stepped up and had everything ready to go 2 hours early! That really helped keep our lines down and get the drive intake done quickly!
Once we got started, we took in 259 drives on Thursday and immediately got rolling by starting the duplication to 146 of them (that’s essentially our capacity for concurrent processing)! The updated ticketing process was further improved to help with our efficiency for intake. Discord was really nice for tracking statistics this year!
On Friday morning, we had another line forming early and we took in even MORE drive than on Thursday! Another 306 came through the door! Adding a few others that came in on Saturday, we took in 567 drives this year! Even more amazingly, we were able to take care of all but 30 of them! This was largely due to the addition of 3 new 1:11 dupers added this year to help replace aging equipment (more on that later).
After all that, we still had a few 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 we can. If this wasn’t intentional, reach out to us (contact information is all over this site) and we’ll see what we can do to return them to you.
Drive REQUESTS
This year, we took in an incredible 567 drives to 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 (again) for the new VX Underground Archive followed closely by the Infocon.org Archive.
Here’s the breakdown of our 2025 intake requests:
A) Infocon.org Archive 140
B) Rainbow tables 1 of 3 86
C) Rainbow tables 2 of 3 80
D) VX Underground Archive 149
E) Rainbow tables 3 of 3 112
DDV Drive content requests
Duplication Equipment
DDV Surgery
The Crew pulls apart an old duplicator.
We were able to process all but 30 drives this year. This was a tremendous improvement from last year as we acquired 4 new 1:11 duplicators to help handle the volume (unfortunately, one of them was DOA so we were only able to use 3. This meant that this year our bottleneck wasn’t duplication equipment! We were a little short on our NTML-9 source drives (hash tables 3 of 3) which kept us from completely clearing out the village). With the new equipment, we were able to cannibalize an old duper to get one of our other dupers up to 100% - always try to reuse what you have available!
DRIVE DETAILS
As we do every year, we catalog the brand and model of each drive we receive. We received 567 drives this year. This gives us a small but statistically viable sample of manufacturer information to share (including the 2 SSDs):
Intake by Manufacturer
DRIVE FAILURES
We recorded 61 drive copy failures this year. We were unable to overcome only a few of these due to time constraints (about 8). We saw a very large number of reconditioned/refreshed/recertified drives this year - most of which failed for various reasons. Many of these were Seagate drives which really drove up the percentage of failures for that manufacturer (13.2% of Seagate drives received - 59% of all failures). MDD was our failure leader this year with a 41.2% failure rate (11.5 percent of all failures). We continue to see a lot of returning drives and had a few failures just due to drive age. If your drive is over 7 years old, it’s time to start looking for a new one.
Toshiba was this year’s winner with a 0% failure rate for the village! There were a few others at 0% but we’re only looking at manufacturers with 5 or more drives in the village for this trophy. All the details can be found below:
DRIVE Statistics
| Manufacturer | Type | Intake | % of All Intake | Failures | % of Fails by Type | % of All Failures |
| TOTALS | 567 | 61 | 10.8% | |||
| Toshiba | 44 | 7.8% | 0 | 0.0% | 0.0% | |
| X300 | 13 | 2.3% | 0 | |||
| N300 | 22 | 3.9% | 0 | |||
| S300 | 3 | 0.5% | 0 | |||
| Other | 6 | 1.1% | 0 | |||
| Seagate | 273 | 48.1% | 36 | 13.2% | 59.0% | |
| Barracuda | 90 | 15.9% | 15 | 16.7% | ||
| Barracuda Pro | 14 | 2.5% | 1 | 7.1% | ||
| Ironwolf | 101 | 17.8% | 12 | 11.9% | ||
| Ironwolf Pro | 13 | 2.3% | 2 | 15.4% | ||
| EXOS | 33 | 5.8% | 5 | 15.2% | ||
| Skyhawk AI | 6 | 1.1% | 0 | 0.0% | ||
| Compute | 7 | 1.2% | 0 | 0.0% | ||
| Firecuda | 1 | 0.2% | 0 | 0.0% | ||
| Enterprise | 5 | 0.9% | 0 | 0.0% | ||
| Other | 3 | 0.5% | 1 | 33.3% | ||
| Western Digital | 220 | 38.8% | 15 | 6.8% | 24.6% | |
| Black | 60 | 10.6% | 1 | 1.7% | ||
| Gold | 15 | 2.6% | 0 | 0.0% | ||
| Purple | 3 | 0.5% | 1 | 33.3% | ||
| Red (no name or Plus) | 40 | 7.1% | 3 | 7.5% | ||
| Red (Pro) | 32 | 5.6% | 4 | 12.5% | ||
| Blue | 15 | 2.6% | 1 | 6.7% | ||
| Green | 1 | 0.2% | 0 | 0.0% | ||
| White & EMAZ | 26 | 4.6% | 1 | 3.8% | ||
| Ultrastar (7K6, DC, HC) | 22 | 3.9% | 3 | 13.6% | ||
| Other | 6 | 1.1% | 1 | 16.7% | ||
| MDD | 17 | 3.0% | 7 | 41.2% | 11.5% | |
| DELL | 1 | 0.2% | 0 | 0.0% | 0.0% | |
| Super Micro | 3 | 0.5% | 0 | 0.0% | 0.0% | |
| HP | 4 | 0.7% | 0 | 0.0% | 0.0% | |
| IBM | 1 | 0.2% | 1 | 100.0% | 1.6% | |
| Water Panther | 2 | 0.4% | 2 | 100.0% | 3.3% | |
| Samsung (SSD) | 2 | 0.4% | 0 | 0.0% | 0.0% | |
DC Discord and Drive TRACKING
Another win for iterative improvements! This year, we were able to automatically track our drive intake, handling, tracking, and human notifications. Big thanks go out to Voltage Spike for helping us expand on the use of our remaining DC32 valet tickets to be able to get even more data from discord! 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.
DDV Talks
We had some really good talks this year at the village. To help minimize village confusion, we only hold talks on Friday (full houses) and Saturday (lightly attended - probably too much partying).
The talks are posted in our channel online at https://www.youtube.com/@DefCon-DDV and will naturally be in the Infocon.org archive in the near future.
Thanks go out to Mauro, Nelson, Stephanie and Pat for bringing us this year’s talks!
DC Next Gen
We absolutely LOVED our team up with DC Next Gen last hear so we stepped it up again this year. In addition to improvements on the challenges we had in DC32, we included additional encryption challenges utilizing the DC Next Gen strip ciphers for DC33! It was GREAT to see kids young and old having fun working out their codes:
Binary Bracelets
DC32 - DC Next Gen Binary Bracelets
This was an easy one to keep going from last year. Making something that anyone can take away with them is always a hit!
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 binary phrases could get quite long but we had enough string and beads for everyone. We’ll keep this one rolling into next year!
Hard Drive Deconstruction
DC32 - DC Next Gen Hard Drive Deconstruction
Our volunteers brought in 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: Atbash, and Caesar, and Strip Ciphers, oh my!
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. Thank you to DC NextGen for making those strip ciphers available!
All of the participants who made it through these challenges were richly rewarded with a customized DDV Champion award!
Wrap up
For DC33 we were able to push almost 4 Petabytes of data (3.924) out the door to attendees- a new record! It was a nice, relaxing, and safe year - no reports of village COVID or con crud, and the overall process went very smoothly. We’ve already started working on the improvements for next year! Stay tuned!
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 those torrents 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!