BSidesNYC 2023 - Opening Remarks - Huxley Barbee and Shweta Jain

welcome everybody to besides New York City 2023 this is the reboots after five year Hiatus we are finally back besides New York City is a conference that is based on accessibility technical talks and community so what do I mean by all that in terms of accessibility we have made tickets 15 only as opposed to some of these other conferences that charge you 100 bucks or even thousands of dollars we had 238 students registered with their.edu addresses these tickets will be refunded if they show up and we also and also we were 26 uh free tickets for those who are under financial hardship so essentially one quarter of the attendance of this conference is is free

for those who need it

when I say technical we went beyond all expectations for this conference and had 127 submissions from all across the globe we had so many submissions that the acceptance rate was only 17 percent so you can be assured that the speakers and the trainers that you are seeing today are of the highest quality anywhere in the cyber security community and we thank very much the speakers that flew out from as far as Sweden and Italy and other parts abroad some of them paying their own way to come here in fact many of our speakers are paying their way to come here so thank you very much speakers in the audience I see you you thank you

uh continuing with the theme of technical talks you are right now in the Red Room Red Room all the talks in here are around uh for for red teams there is also a room just for blue team talks that is downstairs you walk out the atrium you go down the staircase and right there you'll see the Blue Room across the corridor from the blue room is a room just for talks on other colors of the infosec color wheel and then over here next door is the workshop room upstairs on the sixth floor so to get to the sixth floor you walk down the hallways there are two elevated banks on either side of the building you go up to

the sixth floor and there you will see our Village area The Village area also has some talks at the Village podium a lot of those talks are either of course you know Niche interest groups like from uh New York City resistor but we also have many talks on Career Development Career growth and so on and so forth so if you are an early and career person or a student I highly suggest you go up to the Village to take a look uh there are also some technical things going on upstairs on the sixth floor as well I just mentioned New York City resistor but we also have two Capture the Flag competitions up there in the 6-4 quad one is being

hosted by secure code Warrior it is an application security CTF and then there is a second CTF being hosted by ctfd is a more traditional Network Security based CTF there are prizes for both of these which will be announced at the closing remarks moving on to community like any other b-sides this conference is based on a community within the cyber security industry this here is the list of all the volunteers that are making this happen today so you know there's a lot going on here there's probably a thousand of you that are showing up and there's only 40 of us to try and make it happen there's also the planning committee the speakers the sponsors all of whom are part of the

cyber security Community making it happen um but you know for today of course it is the volunteers that are really going to shine and so we call them out here and we thank all of them

foreign so I realized at the beginning I forgot to introduce myself my name is Huxley Barbie I'm the only Huxley Barbie you're ever going to meet inside and outside of cyber security now core to this community of course is your input there's this QR code over here it's also on the back of the printed programs like that gentleman has over there I think on the back of the programs can you lift that here on the back of the program is a QR code after this province please scan this this is a community-based conference so this is your conference you need your input to make sure that it continues in a direction that is of value to all of

you intended sponsors speakers 12 years and so on purpose please please please provide your feedback after this conference I'll keep that Google form up for about a month just collecting your feedback also part of this community of course are our sponsors we have a group of fantastic sponsors that have made this happen earlier I said our tickets are only 15 we were able to give away a number of tickets we're able to refund a number of tickets for students this in large part is because we have all these fabulous sponsors who have donated money to make this happen and we thank them very much for this so a great Round of Applause so they can hear you

out there

and I would be remissed if I were to not mention that among all the sponsors probably the one that's most significant to making this happen the one that actually donated these spaces with a hundred percent discount is John Jay College

so at this time I would like to invite up Professor shweta Jain who leads the John Jay College d4cs program digital forensics and computer science to come and talk to you a little bit about John Jay Professor Jane

welcome everyone um this morning I had a slight feeling that I should ask Chad GPT to write my welcome remark and then I was like okay I've ran out of time to do that so I'll just ring it and now I feel like I should have uh because whatever I say here probably chat GPT would say it better no just kidding so uh my name is shweta Jain uh I'm a professor in the math and computer science department and I also run the master's program in digital forensics and cyber security so our program is kind of unique in the city because we have a mix of legal as well as technical courses and our students come from both stem and

non-stem disciplines and actually our students are quite awesome you might see them around because they're here oh she's an alumni right there but you might see our new and um soon to be minted graduate and undergraduate students here please seek them out or they'll seek you out and encourage them show them the ropes so that they can find jobs in the cyber security field and and then come here and attend besides next time they need your love and support and if you have jobs and internships then of course you know they are the bright Minds you probably want to interview even today um so a couple of things about the program we have uh like I said we have a

mix of uh Technical and uh also legal courses so our program starts with a bunch of core courses they teach you a law and high-tech crime then they go into all the core cyber security stuff and then we do digital forensics we are the probably the only place in the city that teaches digital forensics we have acquired a state-of-the-art lab which is in the sixth floor um about I think there are 13 computers in there they if you go in there which most people won't be able to because it's a secure space you'll see this like gamer computers with huge heavy Towers um waiting to be used or used better so for that a couple of announcements

basically about what we're looking for um so first of all like I already said we have students here who are looking for jobs and internships please talk to them encourage them and if you you know if you come to University we'll tell you hire them um so that's one the second is um we have the state of the art lab here but we also need industry partnership to develop case studies develop the curriculum to actually make good use of those computers so we are looking for an industry Advisory board so if you are uh interested and if you want to contribute our table is right outside my colleague Jennifer Holst is there she's also an

instructor in the program and she has actually uh the interim director right now when I am in sabbatical so please leave your information with her you'll also find two of my colleagues Doug Smith and Nehemiah somewhere here their mandate is to make 200 connections with potential employers and place 200 students in jobs and internships so if they come and talk to you please don't be put off you know if you need to do this and we're happy uh to make those connections right here hopefully they'll make all the 200 connections right here and place 200 students right there yeah that's that's pie in the sky but yeah let's see if that happens um then the third thing uh which I'm

forgetting because Chad GPT I did not use it so uh yeah I think that's that's pretty much it um so we'll be happy to host besides again please come back to us and I hope you all have a great conference uh with that um like I said we we have our keynote speakers somewhere here Lance right there he's a digital forensics expert and so please welcome yeah [Applause]