Afraid of being hacked? Don’t go to Def Con. The code-cracking conference, held annually in Las Vegas, is teeming with hackers looking to make examples of fellow attendees.
The No. 1 rule for the uninitiated? Turn off the wireless connections on your mobile devices. If you don’t, and your gadgets aren’t hardened against hacking, you’ll end up on the infamous “Wall of Sheep”—a digital board that bears the usernames and passwords of attendees who didn’t think it was that easy. (It is.)
As I walked the show floor, I thought about all the corporate conferences I had been to where the risks weren’t so apparent—where attendees were sheared of their data without knowing it. So go on, enjoy your next work trip. But remember: The biggest threat isn’t the network you don’t trust. It’s the one you do.
A version of this article appears in the September 15, 2015 issue of Fortune magazine with the headline “Don’t be a ‘sheep’ on your next work trip.”
