BSidesPGH 2025 Opening Remarks

So afterparty, we talked about that. Thanks for coming to that. A big thank you to Hashior Corp for uh being the afterparty sponsor and we're going to do that um here and we'll kick off the awards uh at the same time. So prizes for CTF and stuff like that and John will talk about that in a moment. I'm going to pass over to Andy. >> Yeah. Um, if you're feeling generous today, we've got donations, yards of registration, um, proceeds, EFI for bides. Um, you know, support the community. There's also plenty of local Pittsburgh communities represented here today. Pittsburgh Capper deals barside oas the list goes on and on. Check out those groups. Um Bides is a great community,

but there's plenty of other great communities in Pittsburgh to help out with. Um emergency exits, let's play, you know, we're a security group. Let's keep it safe. I grew up in a safety focused corporation professionally. Keep an eye on your safety exits. Your main entrance is the way out in the case of an emergency. Um, code of conduct. Let's enjoy the day. We're a community. Let's treat each other how we want to be treated. You know, we don't need to insult each other. If you run into issues, see a bids organizer, volunteer, blue or purple, or casino staff. Um, if you need help, if you break rules, you're out. And most importantly, if you cause an

incident, the rest of the Pittsburgh cyber security community is going to see you causing an incident. Um, let's use your head, treat each other with respect, you know, not cause a spectacle. Um, facilities, we've got restrooms everywhere. If you didn't catch the signs, no smoking or vaping in the conference center, much like the Well, I don't know about the rest of the casino. At least those smoking are baking up later. How about that? Um, lunch 11:30ish to 1:30ish. It's going to be a fantastic lunch buffet. We've got your feedback each year. We're trying to have the lunch that you enjoy. Um, refreshments are throughout the day. Back to the code of conduct. Um, let's play it safe. Consume drinks

responsibly. Don't create a spectacle in front of all of your peers and colleagues. Let's keep ourselves employed, right? Let's keep ourselves safe.

>> All right. Uh, hey everyone. Uh, my name is John. We don't know each other. I'm also short, so I'm going to move that down. Um, just a couple quick reminders. So, one of them is to register early. You might have noticed this year that we had kind of like an escalation with early bird regular tickets and then the late tickets. We had a bunch of people like over a hundred people um paying for those late tickets. We don't want to charge you that. The only reason why we have that is because it's very difficult for us to get enough t-shirts, to get enough food, and to handle the logistics of 400 people showing up and adding

tickets within a week of the event, right? And so this is just a reminder. Set set a reminder next year uh to get tickets earlier. Sign up to our newsletter. Follow us on social media. We really just want to let you know when tickets are open. That's usually around tax day. So, April 15th, uh, keep an eye out for that and, uh, get your early bird tickets. We would much rather, uh, you get early bird than the late tickets. So, please do that. Thank you. Uh, a couple other things. You'll probably notice that we've got these U monitors next to all of the three tracks. So, a quick reminder based on where I'm standing, that is track one.

This is track two. And the one way over there is track three. And then at the end of the hallway is the CTF unlock area. So 1 2 3. All three of those tracks have closed captioning which should be live and on these TVs. So for accessibility reasons, if you need to see those heard here or something like that, you can sit towards the front and you should be able to see that. Good. Also, like we said, we have a capture the flag event. So that's in what's called the Ohio room. It's all the way at the end. That kicks off at 9:00 right after this. It's going to go until 300 p.m. Uh and we've got a whole

bunch of really cool prizes. We're going to be doing a prize for first, second, and third place. And we're going to do an extra special thing, which we'll talk about in a second. But the top three are going to get uh some prizes. We're going to award those at 5:00 here as well. Um the casino is out of scope, so don't hack into the casino. That's not a good time. That's how you get yourself escorted out. Um so please uh don't uh don't do that. In fact, the uh if you want to join the CTF, there's a special CTF Wi-Fi password. Wi-Fi SSID. The password is the casino is out of scope. Okay. So, please don't. And then, yeah,

the prizes will be at 455 at the end of today. Um, so if uh if any of you know uh Derek here, he's pictured on the right. We we lost a really good member of our community uh recently. It's very unfortunate. Um but I wanted to invite Heather up to talk about what we're doing kind of in his arm. Thanks, Sean. Uh, hi everyone. My name is Heather Sprum and I'm the founder and president of the DVO Foundation for Offensive Security. Uh, the DVO Foundation. So, Derek was also known as DVO by his friends and family. Um, once he passed, we wanted to create something that was going to continue his legacy going forward. So the foundation's

mission is to be able to create a st a strong cyber security community while being able to bring education and mentoring and break down the access barriers that is to maybe get the tooling you need or the training that you need. Um what we need from you in order for us to be able to do this uh is to your feedback, right? We we want to know what how can we best serve you guys. Um, I came from the defensive side of the house, so I would always uh joke with him that I I just didn't understand what he was doing. Uh, but I want to make sure that I'm taking his legacy further. So, I want the community's

feedback. Um, what kind of trainings would you guys like, education, um, we would definitely need volunteers. If you know how to set up a CTF or you have a specialy a specialization in a certain field that you want to be able to bring to the community, we'd love to hear from you. Uh we're obviously going to be board members, sponsors. Um if you want to be a mentor, if you've been doing this for a while and you want to help next generation of ethical hackers, we would like for you to to come out. If you want to be mentored, if you want to get better, please contact us. I have the the email here. Um we're also going

to be doing a sponsorship, which I I really want to thank John, Joe, the the whole Besides board for allowing us to do this. And a huge shout out to the Sans Institute. So this year we're going to be doing our first uh sp uh sponsorship uh scholarship and it's going to be for a CTF went out um somebody that's in CTF but does not win. So it does not play. It's not first, second, third. It'll be the major thing is that you are registered and that you try. We want to see that you're actually trying to get to the best that you can possibly be. And if you do that, then you are going to win a uh SANS course um

that was been sponsored by SANS. So, we're gonna try to keep doing this every year. Uh try to make it bigger and better. Uh we really do want to make sure that we're bringing education to the Pittsburgh market. We want to empower the next generation of ethical hackers. And please memories, if if you guys know Derek or knew Derek, I actually invited his family. If you did that, raise your hand. And Chrissy. So, this is his mom, Chrissy, his dad, George, and his sister, Michelle. His uh twin brother couldn't be here with us today, but if you knew uh Derek, please share memories because what we're going to do is when we start the like the

websites, I want to put those memories up there. So, if you didn't know him that you get to a chance to know him. If you want to pull them aside and share that with them, I know that that would mean the world to our family. So, um guys, thank you so much for letting us do this. I really appreciate you. Thank you. [Applause] So yeah, just one quick clarification on that. So the SAMS uh is was giving us a $9,999 free class, right? So if you participate in the CTF, you'll essentially be entered into a raffle and you could win that $9,999 off uh coupon code for an on demand class. So you could do the the pen

testing class or any other class that you'd like. So I highly recommend go over to the CTF room uh and and give it a shot. Right. Oh, wait. There we go. Um and so like I said, we're going to have the CTF prizes. Some of those were funded uh with the money from our sponsors that we purchased, but also a huge shout out to Derek. Uh I'm sorry, Derek. Brandon Eert. Uh Brandon, are you around? There we go. Right here in the middle. Let's give him a round of applause. Uh, so for a ton of really cool gear. So if you're into high five gear, there's like a whole pile of back there. I I literally

had to ask how many items are there in this bundle. There's so many. I think there's seven, right? There's like seven different things. Um, uh, you you have to come to the, um, closing ceremonies to to see what we've got. But lots of really cool stuff there. Thank you, Brandon. Uh, really appreciate it. And final kind of closing it on the CPI. Seriously, please do not mess with the venue. We don't want to get kicked out of here. We'd love to keep coming back to this place if we can. Um, all right. So, we've got some Wi-Fi passwords for you. Again, the casino is out of scope. Can I say this anymore? Um, that's the

CTF one. Um, so that's be dedicated, but if you just want to jump on the Wi-Fi, snap a quick picture of this. These are the passwords. Yes, there is a smiley face in the password. Special characters, right? We want complexity. Uh, all right. I'm going to pass it over to Eric for the black and gold. >> All right. So, every year, uh, we give out what is called the black and gold badge. Defcon has their black badge, but we're Pittsburgh, so everything's black and gold here. Um, and what we like to do is present it to somebody in the community that has been helping everybody kind of get into this information security space, cyber security space over the years. and uh

somebody who dedicates a lot of their time uh and effort in helping other people in the community. So, I think I have the back. Oh, yeah, I do. Right here. So, let me get out my notes real quick because I kind of have a laundry list for the person that is selected for this year. Give me one moment. >> While Eric does that, any other black badge uh holders in the room? >> There you go. Yeah, we got some. >> Yeah. and the recipient of the black and gold badge. Uh you get free admission to besides for besides Pittsburgh at least. So um we do have quite a few that are in attendance over the years. And so let's

get started here. Yeah. So this person um over the years has spent a lot of time building the community and helping in different capacities and volunteer for several organizations. So I'm just going to go through the laundry list here. Um they've been board of directors for Infregard Pittsburgh. Um they've been a volunteer at Besides Pittsburgh for uh oh my god almost 12 years at this point. This will be the 12th year. Also uh this person serves as the treasurer board of directors for Three Rivers information security uh symposium. Also a really great conference that happens a little bit later in the year in the Pittsburgh area. And finally a founding board member of BICS. So I'm pleased to

present the uh black and gold badge to Stephanie Saunders.

[Applause]

Thank you so much. >> Yeah, congratulations. >> Thank you. And please stop by the um we says Pittsburgh booth too. Um, this will be our second year. So, um, big thank you to everybody in this room. I remember doing the CTF at Spirit in the Bus. So, >> Oh, yeah. >> It's really exciting to see everything grow to this capacity. And thank you for everybody who's been on all the boards with me. It really means a lot. Thank you guys so much. >> Thanks, Steph. You're great. >> All right, so we've got uh a couple more quick things. Uh, I know we're on our clock. Let me see how I open this box. This is very tricky. Uh we have one more

super secret uh award which like people that are standing on stage with me don't even know about. Uh which is kind of cool. Um so we actually uh decided that this year we needed to recognize one of our own. So we made this torchbearer um pretty cool award uh actually for Join. >> What surprise? So, uh, let's go back to So, Joe is the only original founder of Pittsburgh, who is still running this year in and year out. He puts so much time in throughout the year. I'm constantly seeing him, instantly, responding to emails, helping to facilitate people in the Slack, get them into the Slack channels, um, helping with all the sponsors, logistics, helping our event organizers, like

everything, right? So, Joe puts a ton of time and effort in. He's been doing it since the beginning. He is the true OG of all of this. So, let's give him a round of applause again.

Thank you. I had no idea they were doing this. So, uh, we won't blavor any kind of, uh, speech. You don't need that for me. But check out the Distilled Security podcast. Uh, I did a little interview this morning with Justin Leapel Line and we talked about all the things that we're doing. And this is for all of you because I wouldn't do this if you didn't care. So, thank you. >> All right. Thank you, Joe. Uh, and I've got one more kind of special thing. This is totally selfish. So, um, I've got someone who'd like to say hi to you all if I could have a couple special people come up on stage. My kids decided

that they wanted to come out this year. And, uh, come on over here. >> Hi, everybody. >> Hi. >> It's my daughter and my son. They wanted to come out. >> Uh, we we want to be a family event, right? And so if you've got kids and you want to bring them, you can absolutely bring people that are under 21. Here's a testimony to that. Um just register ahead of time and bring them in. And we're going to do everything that we can to facilitate people that are under 21. Um so all right guys, you can go take a seat. Um >> All right. And that brings us to the end of our kickoff ceremony. We're going to

start to distribute into the three different tracks. We've got different talks starting at 9:00 a.m. which it is now 9:03. So it'll be happening shortly. Uh just a couple of quick reminders. If you want to stay in touch, we have the pits slack. Um there are right there is a QR code on the right. Just get into the Slack channel. There's a besides Pittsburgh channel. Chat with people network. Um we've got the birds of a feather which is if you want to just talk about a topic. I want to talk about you know AI tools or want to talk about like software development or apps or cloud security or whatever you want to talk about. If you just want to find

other people interested in that same topic, throw it in the pits slack channel and just find a time to meet them at the birds of the feather. We're also going to have a little signup sheet over there so you can just take a a notepad sticker and put it on at a time and just meet up there and talk about whatever you'd like to talk about. Whatever topic is interesting to you, what your hot topic is at work, meet up with other people that are solving similar problems or have solved similar problems. We want to make a a community and like I said also make a family event. So um we've also got a LinkedIn

group, Twitter, follow us on social medias, etc., etc. Uh that wraps up our kickoff. Thanks everybody for coming out. Um do you want to say something? Just everybody uh let's take five minutes get to the next track where you're going to be and thank you so much. Appreciate you all. [Applause]