Def Con, one of the world’s largest and longest-running hacking conventions, announced Wednesday that three people linked to Jeffrey Epstein are no longer allowed to attend.
The conference is poised to add Pablos Holman, Vincenzo Iozzo, and Joichi Ito to its public list of banned individuals, citing the trio as appearing in the recent release of Justice Department files related to its investigation of the late investor and convicted sex offender. Def Con also cited an article in Politico based on emails the three exchanged with Epstein.
Joan Vollero, a spokeswoman for Iozzo, told TechCrunch in a statement that Def Con’s actions “make perfect sense, given that Mr. Iozzo has not attended a convention in two decades.”
“It was a rush to judgment that was not based on any investigation or wrongdoing by Mr. Iozzo,” the spokesman said.
Representatives for Def Con, Holman, and Ito did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
The move to ban the trio comes days after TechCrunch reported that cybersecurity conferences Black Hat and Code Blue had removed Iozzo from their official review board pages, amid new and emerging revelations linking the famous hacker to, among others, Epstein.
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Iozzo is a cybersecurity industry veteran who is currently the founder and CEO of ID startup SlashID. He previously served as director at CrowdStrike after the security giant acquired its cybersecurity startup IperLane in 2017. As TechCrunch previously reported, Iozzo was involved with Epstein between 2014 and 2018, including after the Miami Herald reported new allegations that Epstein molested dozens of women and children.
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Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting sex from girls and was registered as a sex offender in New York and Florida. In 2019, the Department of Justice accused Epstein of trafficking, exploiting and abusing dozens of teenage girls. Epstein died in prison.
Iozzo previously told TechCrunch that his interactions with Epstein were “limited to unprecedented business opportunities, and discussions of emerging markets and technologies,” and that he “never observed or participated in any illegal activity or conduct.”
Before his start, Iozzo was a research fellow at the MIT Media Lab, which Ito headed at the time. The two appear in several of Epstein’s emails together.
Joichi Ito was the director of the MIT Media Lab until 2019, when he resigned after it was reported that he knew that Epstein was a convicted sex offender and that he and the university had extensive personal and financial ties to Epstein.
Holman, meanwhile, is a general partner at venture capital firm Deep Future and describes himself on his website as a “hacker, inventor and tech futurist.”
Holman had been in contact with Epstein since 2010, arranged to live in one of his New York City apartments in 2013, and tried to help Epstein cover up negative online stories about him.
According to the email, Epstein made plans to attend Def Con with Holman in 2013, but it’s unclear if they attended. Def Con founder Jeff Moss said that as far as he knew, “Epstein never went.”
