We’ve all attended large industry international trade conferences hosting tens of thousands of people. These are spectacles designed to raise brand awareness, educate those in attendance about industry advances, network with colleagues you haven’t seen in a spell, all while promoting new products and services. By contrast there are also smaller regional industry trade shows that are scaled-down versions of these larger events with many of the same objectives, and then there are Security BSides events.

For those not familiar with BSides, they were started in 2009 to further educate folks on cybersecurity at the city and regional level. Think Blackhat, but on a Saturday at the local civic center, and with perhaps 200 people instead of 19,000. Let’s face it, most security engineers are introverts so socializing at significant events like Blackhat is uncomfortable. While bringing a few coworkers or friends on a Saturday to a BSides event can be downright fun. Let’s face who doesn’t want to sit for 20-30 minutes in the lock-pick village with their friends to test their skills on some of MasterLock, Schlage or Kwikset’s most common products. It’s heartwarming to teach a NOOB (short for a newbie) how to pick a lock, then watch their excitement when the hasp clicks open for the first time.

Then there’s always the Capture the Flag (CTF) or wireless CTF for when you’re not interested in the session(s) being offered. If you’ve not played a security capture the flag event before then you really are missing something. It is a challenging series of puzzles served up Jeopardy-style. Say 10 points if you can decrypt this phrase. Or 20 points if you can determine whose attacking your machine on five different ports. Perhaps another 50 points if you can write a piece of code that can read a web page, unscramble five words, and post the five proper words back to the website in three seconds before the clock expires and the words are no longer valid. It’s an intellectual problem solving competition at its finest, and did I mention there is a leaderboard. Often projected high on the wall for all to see throughout the day are the teams with the highest scores. It really warms the heart when your team is the second on the board and it stays in the top five most of the day. While we were the second on the board at BSides Asheville, we didn’t stay in the top five for long.

More seriously though, for a $20 entry fee (which includes a T-shirt) these BSides events offer an affordable local event for cybersecurity engineers and hobbyists. BSides enables socially challenged people the opportunity to step out of their shell, and reach out to similar like-minded individuals while networking in a comfortable and technical space. You can bond over lock-picking, a CTF challenge, during lunch or between sessions. Bring one of your nerd friends as a wingman, or better yet several to form a CTF team, and make a day of it. If you’d like to check out an online CTF one of our favorites is RingZer0. If you want to see the hacker side of the Technology Evangelist, W3bMind5, or read about his team’s experiences at BSides Asheville then they can be found at RedstoneCTF.

The RedstoneCTF team may be attending BSidesCLT on September 28th and BSidesRDU on October 19th.