Wednesday, July 20, 2016

BSidesCLE 2016 (belated) Summary

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.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Pre-BSidesCLE post

This is exciting. First year we've offered training, so we purposely kept the number of tracks relatively low and still had double the number of submissions than slots available, which was great, but also tough decision making. Sign up for the selected talks has been excellent and tomorrow we will be trying this for the first time. We are ready. Today, 6/23, the only thing we are waiting for are the programs and stickers which both should be ready tomorrow. The conference itself (sold out) has another great schedule. Opening comments at 8:45AM 6/25, first keynote at 9AM. Ian Amit, Chris Roberts and hometown hero Dave K are this year's keynotes. Bloody mary bar opens at 8 and will be complimented by mimosas, fired up taco food truck for lunch, beer sponsor hardbit solutions will be providing actual brewery microbrews, amazing sponsors and 3 tracks of awesome knowledge. See you there!

Thursday, February 18, 2016

BSidesCLE 2016 planning

We are well underway for our 2016 event, which is Saturday, June 25th and again at the legendary indie rock venue the Grog Shop in Cleveland Height's Coventry locale. TrustedSec has already signed on as our Event Sponsor for the 2nd year in a row! The CFP is open now and runs until 5/1 and can be found here. New this year #BSidesCLE will be having a training day! Friday, June 24th will be dedicated for training and we will have multiple tracks. The Call for Trainers is open, will also be open until 5/1 and can be found here.

We have an amazing group of keynotes (this year there will be morning, afternoon and closing keynote slots) - Chris Roberts (@sidragon1), Dave Kennedy (@hackingdave) and Ian Amit (@iiamit). Holy crap, this is going to be dope! Again! More info will be forthcoming. You can get tickets here. See you there.