Ted Demopoulos - Message to Security BSides Athens 2024 - Signed Books

hello welcome to bides Athens this is Ted demopoulos I wish I could be there with you but I'm about 8 to 10,000 km away and schedule wasn't very convenient either so I'm not making it this year I did however donate a couple of my books and hopefully I will be making it some future Year my first book started as just me kind of looking at why some of us are so successful more so than others and by successful we mean lots of things I mean people that make a positive difference in our field people that are listened to and we're not listened to all that often people that get a lot of things done and I started interviewing

people now a lot of these were informal me having a beer or a coffee with friends some were very formal some were interviews were actually reached out to people I didn't know and said can I interview you and this project got kind of a a joke as a name the infosec Rockstar project and it it started as a joke and the name kind of stuck and some people loved the name and some people hated the name so it was a good name it get attention so the book's called infosec Rockstar and interestingly although people said different things there was a lot of commonality it turns out the most successful people are not just technical Tech technical skills

really matter right and particularly in any technical role we need to work on our technical skills quite regularly right updating them keeping them current and so forth but it was the other skills that make the biggest difference and that came across universally from almost all of the interviews now some of these are fairly famous people that you've heard of some are people that just make an enormous difference do great things that are only known in their Circle my second book was really had to do with a blind spot I had you know if I look back at my career what are the questions people have asked me most often it's not about I don't know how buffer overflows

work or how to patch effectively or anything REM how like asymmetric encryption Works turns out what people have asked me the most is hey you work for yourself how's that work how do you get clients what do you charge them and other questions and I've always said I don't know I don't know this is what I do this is what works for me and I never realized that so many people were asking me that right cuz it was like a few every week or two and overall it was more questions on that than anything else so I started interviewing people that are consultants and a lot of my friends are Consultants both in our field and other fields like

how's that work for you how do you get clients how do you set pricing how do you make things work long time and a myriad of other things and that's my second book on infoset Consulting how to get started doing that and I've donated a few of both of these books to besides Athens and again I wish I could be there in person but at least I sent a few books they're also available on Amazon and local bookstores and so forth now I hope you enjoy yourself at bides Athens hope you learn a lot do some great networking and hopefully I'll join you in the future maybe next year right I said I'm 8 or 10,000 kilometers away but

I kind of like Greece and I've had a blast on this trip visiting Athens I am home right now so that I'm just going to say hey have a great time enjoy enjoy bides and hopefully I'll see you in the future goodbye