The Call Center Village Contest @ DEF CON 33

I don't have a separate blog for Call Center Village, so you're stuck learning about our security challenge for the time being. Feel free to skip out on this one if you're not interested in the security of call centers.

Here's what you can expect in this issue:

• Join us at DEF CON 33 in Las Vegas
• Evolving the Call Center Village contest
• New challenges better focused on AI (gasp!)
• Two boss-level challenges instead of one
• We're dialing up the fun at Party Line

Join us at DEF CON 33 in Las Vegas

DEF CON 33 (Aug. 8-11, 2025) will be our third-run of Call Center Village, and I'd like to think we're improving over time. Maybe not exponentially, but improving nonetheless.

We've previously ran the village at two conferences:

• NAEO Annual Conference
• Hackers Teaching Hackers

For DEF CON, we are considered a Contest and haven't quite graduated to be an actual Village, yet. Hopefully we'll perform well enough to get invited back. Just getting to this point has been an absolute dream.

DEF CON 33, with an expected ~30,000+ attendees, is by far the biggest "professional" event I've ever personally participated in... or attended, for that matter.

It's unlikely any of them will see this, but thank you so much, DEF CON.

Evolving the Call Center Village contest

The primary structure of Call Center Village isn't changing that much, but we have made a number of specific changes to the challenges, dashboard, and goals of the contest.

For starters, we're keeping the three environments from our previous runs:

1. A Remote Agent's Home "Office" (Remote Agent)
2. Your Call Center's Main Office (Main Office)
3. Your Hosting Infrastructure (Data Center)

We're also holding onto our "Ticket" entry method, where you have to unlock the challenge associated with our Call Center Village contest ticket which will unlock the rest of our challenges.

We kept the tickets digital to avoid printing cost - guided by the fact that we tossed hundreds of extra tickets in the trash at Hackers Teaching Hackers. This was largely due to not having access to distribute the tickets ahead of the conference in the swag bag because we weren't a sponsor, but once the ticket is solved it becomes just another recyclable moment anyway.

But not everything went well enough to keep. After a few runs, we were able to identify a number of changes and improvements we would need to make:

• We had too many challenges in general, which hurt quality.
• We had too many physical security challenges for our audience.
• A cohesive story-line didn't get communicated well, at all.
• We didn't have the things people thought a Call Center Village should have.
• To "participate" in DEF CON contests we need to have a winner.

Apparently, community challenges without individual winners aren't so popular, as mentioned in our HTH 2025 post-mortem post

Call Center Village @ HTH 2025: Post-Mortem

We attended Hackers Teaching Hackers 2025 this past week, running Call Center Village at our first security-focused conference.

Call TheoryPatrick at Call Theory

But seriously, we had something like ~20 different items on our challenge dashboard and it ended up being too many. Maybe 10 of them were related to physical security (lock-picking, safe-cracking, door-entry, money-bags, etc.) which was too many for what we're trying to teach (i.e., call center security!)

My original goal was 12 challenges (4 for each simulated environment) that culminated in one final challenge, but I ended up throwing in a bunch more just to make the rows even on the challenge dashboard.

The things we do as web developers...

Anyhow, we're going to slim things down for DEF CON and stick with my original goal of 12 challenges broken down in the following manner for each environment:

1. Social-Engineering/Physical-Security
2. Network/Protocol Security
3. Application/Web/API Security
4. Telephony/PBX/SIP Security

Along with these categories, we'll be assigning points based on the difficulty of the challenge (Easy, Medium, Hard) . This will allow us to choose a definitive winner at the end of the conference for inclusion in the DEF CON Contest Award Ceremony that takes place before the full DEF CON Closing Ceremonies.

Finally, we're keeping the community-based clue unlock. This means that if anyone solves the challenge, then everyone will be able to see the clues revealed from it. It also keeps a little bit of the community aspect of the challenge intact.

You could also consider it a catch-up mechanic.

New challenges better focused on AI (gasp!)

If you've breached the subject of AI with me, you learned that I have a mixed bag of feelings and opinions. But the fact remains I use a combination of open-source and commercial solutions for various tasks in my personal life and business operations.

Some of those tools include Cursor, Claude Code, Whisper.cpp, Ollama, LM Studio, ChatGPT, Github Copilot, Jetbrains AI + Junie, Duck.ai, and Lumo.

It boils down to this:

To this end, the AI tools that I've been using are "good" – but up until recently most of them felt like any real-time telephone conversations had too much latency to replace call center agents.

🚨 This latency is no longer a moat that the call center and answering service industry can rely upon. 🚨

I'll write more about this in the near-ish future, but I'm going to be leaning into using AI to augment agents (and not replace them.) Even if that means I have to use a big-tech service provider.

Two boss-level challenges instead of one

The other change that we're introducing to the Call Center Village contest is that instead of a single "capstone" challenge where you try to use the clues you've unlocked to socially-engineer a real call-center agent, we're introducing a parallel capstone challenge to do the same thing against a conversational AI agent.

Whether you use AI tools or your own prowess, you'll have the opportunity to go toe-to-toe agianst a human or a robot - or both!

Otherwise, we'll fall-back to total points gained over the course of the contest.

Putting this all together, it means the final challenge-dashboard structure will be:

• 1 Challenge that unlocks the contest
• 4 Challenges based on a Remote Agent
• 4 Challenges based on the Main Office
• 4 Challenges based on the Data Center
• 1 Event for the Call Center Village party
• 1 Live Agent Capstone Challenge
• 1 AI Agent Capstone Challenge

In order to attempt the capstone challenges, the community must unlock the contest and complete it's 12 challenges.

If they are not unlocked by the end of the day on Saturday, we'll make the capstone challenges available on Sunday (10am - 1pm) for anyone to try, but the actual contest cutoff for points will be at 12pm so we have time to submit the winner to the contest Goons comfortably.

The live agent calls are still moderated and we will not allow any type of abuse towards the real agents fielding the calls, so you'll need to see a Call Center Village contest team-member for help once they are unlocked or made available.

We're dialing up the fun at Party Line

Okay, I'm really excited about the Call Center Village party - i.e., Party Line, on Saturday night (August 9th, during DEF CON 33.)

We created a public information phone number that you can call and find out about official and/or publicly available to attendees at the various Hacker's Summer Camp conferences.

i.e., the "Party Line" - and it's active!

The Party Line: +1-833-970-2600

We've still got our Asterisk-based party line happening at the actual party. The public Party Line was a learning opportunity for Conversational AI for me, and hopefully a fun little addition to the week.

Also, we still need sponsors! It's not too late, especially since drink tickets are $17 – not the $15 we thought!

Jay has concocted some of the most ridiculous Asterisk dial-plans I've seen and the party-line is going to be a riot. We've got neon phones, a giant dial-pad, flashing lights, great music, and even a full-size British-style telephone booth.

You might even catch Ma Bell on the party line, who knows. 🤷

Bring your stickers, because we'll need to fill up the inside of the phone booth with them!

Call Center Village’s Party Line @ DEF CON 33 - Call Center Village

Join us at Call Center Village’s Party Line, an after-hours party open to all DEF CON attendees! Help us celebrate the human operators who make call centers and answering services more usable, accessible, and private.

Call Center Village

It's going to be tele-fun! (Get it?! It was funny, I promise.)