Archived from Pace University Seidenberg News on December 30, 2025
The Answers to the Burning Question: What is a Shmoo?
Seidenberg student Anthony C. Martini (MS/CS ‘16), recipient of the NSF CyberCorps® Scholarship for Service, reflects on his recent experience at ShmooCon. He writes:
Readers,
First and foremost, thank you to the “Shmoopers” who sponsored my trip through the Shmooze-a-Student Scholarship awarded to 25 attendees each year to help subsidize the trip expense for students. I have received the scholarship for 2 years in a row and found the experience invaluable and encourage all students to apply.
ShmooCon is different. “ShmooCon is an annual East Coast hacker convention held on offering three days of an interesting atmosphere for demonstrating technology exploitation, inventive software and hardware solutions, and open discussion of critical infosec issues” (ShmooCon.com). The philosophy is to keep the conference at around 1400 attendees, and this is manageable by Mr. Bruce Potter, Mrs. Heidi Potter, and the “ShmooGroup” team.
ShmooCon itself is a very affordable conference, which allows many young students and professionals to attend. However, spots at the conference are highly coveted and often sell out within 10 seconds after tickets become available online (we like to call this “Happy F5 Day” in reference to the web browser refresh key). I feel that this conference’s industry to hacker curiosity ratio would be about 30/70. This dynamic leaves room for being sly and professional, spontaneous over regimented, and laid back rather than rushed. Also if you are a nosey noodge, you could easily leave the conference with enough security vendor t-shirts to impress your friends with one for each day of the week.
ShmooCon is very entertaining, offering 3 tracks of talks all weekend as well as events such as Lock Pick Village by Tonik, ShmooCon Labs, Hack Fortress, Wireless CTF, and just so many more. Winners of events often win the most up-to-date gadgets ranging from tablets to 3D printing machines to tickets for next year’s ‘Con.
The Theme: What is a Shmoo?
The Shmoo is a mythical creature and there isn’t much significance in the way of security per se, but it does promote the individuality and the very essence of the con. All in all this conference does have a unique culture that is sure to entertain.
If you need a wonderful starter event as your first, this should be the one. You can view many of the talks for free at the website, in their archive that is available to the public, however I would encourage you to present on being amongst others in the community – to mingle, make friends and build a professional network. I will mention that many of the vendor booths are hiring students for internships and full-time positions! I hope to see you at ShmooCon 2016!
If anyone has any questions please feel free to reach out to the ShmooGroup at info@shmoocon.org. We also offer more opportunities for conference scholarships!
