How much does it suck to be Michelle Madigan?

A lot, especially since being outed as the press' mole in the hacker-only conference DefCon. Her measly goal was to sneak in as a programmer and catch hackers admitting to illegal activity.

What happened is quite a hilarious story, but first its key to note that trying to trick a group of people with more connections than the alphabet boys (CIA, DEA, NSA, you get the hint) is a bad idea. From there it just kind of goes downhill, basically someone tipped off the people inside the conference and they decided to play a little game.

They brought a bunch of people from the conference in to play a little game of "Spot the Fed" only upon arrival, while Ms. Maddigan was there, they changed the game to "Spot the Undercover Reporter" which caused the reporter bolt out of the room. If I were her I would just disconnect myself from the world and move into the side of a hill because doing anything connected to the digital world right now would probably be a very bad idea.

NBC's DefCon Mole Outed, Stalked by Hackers and Press [via Gizmodo]