Dark Capabilities - When Tech Companies Become Threat Actors
Greg Conti, Tom Cross
DEF CON 33 (backfill) · Day 1 · Main Stage
In an era where technology giants wield immense influence, Tom Cross and Greg Conti presented a provocative and deeply analytical talk at DEF CON titled "Dark Capabilities - When Tech Companies Become Threat Actors." The core thesis challenges the conventional understanding of corporate power, arguing that large tech companies possess capabilities that often rival, or even surpass, those of nation-states, extending far beyond their stated commercial purposes. This talk urges the security community to look beyond explicit product features and consider the latent, unacknowledged, and potentially dangerous functionalities inherent in ubiquitous technologies.
AI review
Cross and Conti are clearly smart people who've done real work in adversarial thinking and information operations, and the framing — tech companies as unacknowledged threat actors with latent 'dark capabilities' — is genuinely worth articulating for a DEF CON audience. The problem is that most of the substance is conceptual scaffolding rather than hard research, and the 'evil vacuum cleaner' thought experiments, while illustrative, don't move much beyond what a thoughtful attendee already suspects.