Passing the Torch - Mentoring and Protecting Our Students
Navaar Johnson, Sam Comini
DEF CON 33 · Day 1 · Main Stage
"Passing the Torch - Mentoring and Protecting Our Students" at DEF CON was an unconventional yet highly insightful session that transformed from a planned panel discussion into an interactive community forum. Led by Navaar Johnson, an IT administrator with 15 years of experience in K12 education, and Sam Comini, a security professional with over 25 years in consulting, the talk aimed to address the unique and pressing cybersecurity challenges faced by educational institutions. The format, which invited audience members to act as "panelists" contributing red team attack vectors and blue team defensive strategies, underscored the collaborative spirit necessary to tackle these complex issues.
AI review
A community-driven session that punches above its weight given its practitioner-in-the-trenches origin. The accessibility-framework bypass for lockdown browser circumvention and the voice-clone demo are genuinely useful field observations, but the talk lives at the practitioner war-story level — not novel research — and the format trades depth for breadth.