The BSides security conference has gone global since 2009, when it first began in Las Vegas as a place for talks that weren’t accepted by Black Hat or Defcon. The movement has now reached Budapest and, with help from two of our own, the first event was a success.
More than 400 people attended BSides Budapest (with a Twitter hashtag of #BSidesBUD2017) on March 2 to hear talks on a variety of security topics, from hacking IP cameras through the cloud to getting the most value from security logs.
Attila Marosi and Sandor Nemes from SophosLabs played key roles in organizing the event. Marosi’s statistics show how well things went:
- Some 705 people registered and 429 showed up, which is quite robust for an event in its first year.
- Attendees arrived from 11 countries.
- Seventeen speakers were from 6 countries in 3 continents.
The event included one main track of talks and another track for workshops. And, of course, the capture-the-flag contests that have become a BSides staple.
“At the main track there were 11 sessions – two 15-minute light talks and the rest were ordinary 30-45 minute talks,” Marosi said. “At the workshop session there were 4 topics, each one 2 hours long.”
SophosLabs threat researcher Tamás Boczán gave a talk about how online gamers are using malware-like techniques to cheat. (You can read about the presentation in this Naked Security article.)
In a post on the BSidesBUD website, the organizers made it clear that the event is here to stay:
Based on the interest and success of #BSidesBUD2017 we already started brainstorming about #BSidesBUD2018. From now on every BSidesBUD conferences will take place on the first Thursday of March, so if you do the math, you’ll get that the next one will be on 1st March, 2018. Enter the date into your calendar!
