Almost a month since BSidesCLE 2016 and due to some elective medical modifications and the associated time off my feet I finally have some time to write about the event. Which was great again. First, huge props to all of our sponsors and partners:
Event Sponsor: TrustedSec
Diamond Sponsors: Black Box Network Services and Cisco Systems
Silver Sponsors: Hurricane Labs, StealthCare, SANS Institute, Optiv
Beer Sponsor: Hardbit Solutions featuring Actual Brewery
A/V Partner: Something New Entertainment
Video Recording: Adrian Crenshaw of TrustedSec
Venue: Grog Shop and B-Side Liquor Lounge and Arcade
Lunch Provider: Fired Up Taco Food Truck
More props to all of our volunteers who helped make the event run smooth and helped Adrian and Something New Entertainment ensure the whole event went smooth.
Special thanks to our trainers who helped us offer specialized infosec training at BSidesCLE for the first time this year the day before the conference. It was a great learning experience that we will definitely improve upon next year, and with one HUGE exception, was a success. That exception is the fact that one of our trainers was a no show and we had a full room of 25 people who paid for this person's training sitting in the room waiting for this person to show up while myself and our organizers tried to get in touch with the trainer unsuccessfully. we discovered he ended up accepting a talking spot at BSidesAthens Greece the same weekend and neglected to tell us. I do not intend to derail this post of all of the great things that happened at BSidesCLE with more of this, but so far this person has yet to reach out to explain and/or apologize, so I'll leave it at that.
We had record setting attendance this year and have some interesting associated metrics. This is the 3rd BSidesCLE that this organizational group has put on and for the first time, as a result of the human association that "free" does not necessarily have "value", we decided to charge $5 for shirts this year. Oddly enough, 80+ percent of the people who either paid the $5 for a shirt or graciously donated to the event through eventbrite showed up to the event. Contrasted with the ~40% of the people who fairly chose a free ticket and actually showed up. The organizers will analyze this further to determine where we take this data for BSidesCLE 2017, but even if we made it $5 for the event across the board and $10 for a shirt I feel it is safe to say most would still agree the value proposition would still be absolutely worth it given the amount of knowledge, talent, food, alcohol and genuine infosec community family values BSidesCLE brings.
The one drawback to being an organizer is we don't have the luxury of watching all of the talks, but I did catch portions of some really great ones. Keynotes aside (who all were amazing) some mini highlights I briefly really enjoyed include Nir Yosha, Cameron Moore, Adam Hogan, Charles Yost, Jimmy Byrd, Brad Hegrat, Eric Mikulas, Kevin Gennuso, Wolf Goerlich and rookies Raquel Milligan and Jonathan Cartwright. This week I also intend to catch up on the videos Adrian and team recorded. I also caught about 10 minutes of Jeremy Mio's talk on government cyber attack response, which was not recorded at his request, but was pretty dark, great stuff. Pick his brain about it.
Ian's morning keynote was an exceptional talk on actual effective security testing and risk analysis that provides true value in the real world, and due to a new job may be his last public facing talk for a time. Chris' lunch keynote was amazing and controversial as he is wont to do and definitely will have me thinking about the vulnerabilities of the food chain for some time. And Dave K was Dave K, nuff said. Again super thanks to our three keynotes.
Thanks to all who attended and participated, I hope everyone enjoyed all aspects of the event and if anyone has any questions/comments/suggestions feel free to reach out to any one of us.
Tip your bartenders! Cheers.
