Most professional conferences hand their guests the hotel Wi-Fi password and call it a day. Black Hat doesn’t. Before each of its annual gatherings in Las Vegas, London, and Singapore, the organizers build a network from scratch — switches, access points, firewalls, monitoring sensors — and stand it up inside the venue. The Network Operations Center, or NOC, then has to defend that network, in real time, against thousands of the world’s best hackers. Some are external adversaries trying their luck. Many are attendees the conference has explicitly told to attack the infrastructure as part of the curriculum.