Fall 1994 -> Spring 1995
Then HOPE came up, and we went. August 12-14th, 1994, in NYC. By this time I was doing independent contract work running and securing Unix systems for companies and wanted to get "back in the scene". I was greatly dissapointed by the state of "computer security" in corporations, and was wondering what the hackers had been up to while I had been out of it. HOPE summed it up quickly. Sixteen terminals were set up off a sparc2 and at anyone point at a "hacking" conference there were at least a dozen people either wasting time, and bandwidth, on IRC, or even worse, Mudding....
Corporations had nothing to fear about security if they could just create a "mud" firewall, something that could detect hackers and throw them into a "mud". It would be instant complacency among hackers, and Corporations could be safe from any type of unauthorized exploring. The side effect of this is possible "infection" of this into the work force, so you would probably need to enforce an internal firewall to keep your workers from getting to the "mud".
While there I did manage to meet some people who where pretty cool, and then we hacked root on the unhackable HOPE sparc, twice. The people I teamed up with for this venture were: BioHazard, Pluvius, & Aleph1.