BSides Tampa 11: April 5 and 6 at USF!

It’s back! The 11th edition of BSides Tampa, Tampa Bay’s community-led cybersercurity conference, happens Saturday, April 6th at Marshall Student Center at USF.

You’ll want to attend BSides if:

• You work in cybersecurity, because your peers — some of whom you might not know — will be there.
• You’re looking for a cybersecurity job. You’ll get to network with people in the field, and you’ll find the conference’s Career track helpful.
• You’re curious about cybersecurity. What do cybersecurity people do? They test systems for vulnerabilities (go to the talks in the Offense / Red Team track), they protect systems from attackers (go to the talks in the Defense / Blue Team track), and they create processes to enhance security (go to the talks in the Governance track).
• You’re into intelligence — human and artificial. There’s an AI / Defense track that covers these topics.
• You want to learn. I can’t think of a BSides where I didn’t learn at least three important things.
• You want to know what the Tampa security scene is like. Tampa has an underappreciated security scene, and you’ll get to see what it’s like at BSides Tampa!

Want to attend BSides? Register before April 6!

BSides Tampa is sponsored by the Tampa Bay chapter of (ISC)², which is clever and mathematically-correct shorthand for “International Information System Security Certification Consortium”. (ISC)² is a non-profit specializing in training and certifying information security professionals.

BSides gets it name from “b-side,” the alternate side of a vinyl or cassette single, where the a-side has the primary content and the b-side is the bonus or additional content.

Here’s the origin story: When the 2009 Black Hat conference in Las Vegas received more presentation submissions than they could take on. There were many presenters whose talks weren’t accepted, but were still very good — there just wasn’t enough room for them at Balck Hat.

So they banded together and made their own parallel conference that ran in parallel to Black Hat — it’s from that event that we get BSides.

BSides conferences are community events, and unlike a lot of tech conferences, they’re inexpensive. BSides Tampa 2024 costs $45 to attend — the same price as last year — and that gets you:

• Access to all conference tracks
• Access to Discord server
• Access to the exhibition area, villages, and sponsorship area
• BSides Tampa 2024 t-shirt
• BSides Tampa 2024 badge
• Admission to the happy hour after the conference

There are a lot of tracks at BSides Tampa 2024:

1. Main track
2. Offense / Red team
3. Defense / Blue team
4. AI / Defense / Other
5. Governance
6. CISO track
7. Career track

Want to attend BSides? Register before April 6!

Want to get a feel for what BSides Tampa is like?

Here’s my writeup of last year’s BSides Tampa.