Closing Remarks

Hello everybody. Sorry about the delay and welcome to closing ceremonies um for Besides San Francisco 2025. Um so first of all I just want to thank everybody for coming. Um it's been an amazing year. Uh you know this is it's just been it's great. We have so much stuff that has happened this year. I I hope that everybody has had an amazing last uh two days and so very happy that you were able to join us. So diving right in attendance by the numbers. Um so total we had about 2500 participants and that includes all the different kinds of of groups. This is our biggest year ever. Um so it's it's been really amazing. In fact, normally

Sunday is actually a slower day for us. Uh, but I've had multiple people tell me today that they thought things were bustling just as much um almost as as Saturday. And that is because just like again, we have such so many more people that were able to attend um including a yeti um and seven larpers of course um from last night. So that it's been a a great year. So um but yeah, 2025 biggest year for uh Bside San Francisco ever.

Cool. Let's talk a little bit about the CFP. Um, so we had 363 submissions received. Uh, they were reviewed over the course of a couple of months by a team of 13, including our nine member review uh, team. We had 88 talks this year, an additional 15 additional sessions for 103 total presentations. That is the most that we've ever had. And that's thanks to the fact that we now have all of AMC. Um, so 16 different auditoriums that we can actually have content in. So again, most year ever. Uh, last year, think about just as a comparison, we had 65 talks. So we added 38 more this year, which is great. So it's just really cool that we're able to

just add more content, give you more opportunities for conversation, and let you become, you know, a true participant. So here's just some fun uh statistics uh captured from our CFP team and our program operations team. So we had 44 new uh presenters this year that had never ever presented uh at Bside San Francisco before. Uh dragons were referenced more than 100 times in uh across all the talk submissions. Uh we had 48 that were actually about AI which was our main theme last year. So we can still see that that topic continues to come up across the industry and including um the the CFP process itself. Uh 17% uh and and because all of us are

you know notorious at being uh last minute uh folks um 17% of submissions were made on the last day. In fact, the last one came in at 11:58 p.m. Um, so the uh the program operations team sent at least, this is just based off of the the some of the tooling they had, 2,270 emails to all the the presenters. Um, but this is only as the what we could do get the count from our actual tools. We think it's actually a lot more. But yeah, just the amount of emails, the amount of time that our program ops team, just again, all volunteers are putting in this is just amazing. Um, we did this year we had

something new. We had one of our our leads was not able to make it uh to the event this year. Um, but was able to kind of help out and and watch the streams online and kind of help us out. and we uh we had one remote stream observer and so uh her name is Sarah and Sarah is amazing and uh you know we're very sad that she couldn't be here with us person but she's uh been watching all weekend uh so long to help us out. So I just want to say a special shout out to to Sarah for uh from Canada to actually you know help us out this weekend. I'm going to give a round of applause to

Sarah. It was very helpful having her watching the streams and letting us know like, "Hey, something's going off in this." This was very helpful. Um, so again, some uh postshow program stats and fun facts. So, we have uh a lot, you know, over 3,000 different slides across the presentation. Over uh 2,000 affirmation cards were signed by Clint, if you remember the original uh keynote, and one dragon skull given to a speaker. So, really cool. interesting things. So let's just talk about uh some of the talks the the the topics that were covered in the talks this year. Our top three that were actually covered were blue operations, product app and web security and security leadership and

culture. But as you can see there are we had our talks span the gambit of all the different uh things involved in information security and beyond. Um, so it's it's great to see that there is content there. No matter what kind of part uh you know area of infosc that you're part of, there are there's content here for you. So let's jump into the CTF capture the flag. This is the ninth year that our CFP team, sorry CTF team has been doing it. Um, and so next year is year 10. So maybe there'll be some fun stuff in store for for next year for them. Uh, so they wanted to provide some stats. uh we had almost 50 more users playing this

year and an additional 15 more teams on site than last year and an additional nine challenges on top of last year as well. But you can see um some of the statistics here. Uh so we had over a thousand registered users uh of those and then at you know 800 teams 400 or so of those teams actually found at least one flag and uh you know and then a bunch of on-site teams and a total of 57 different challenges. So let's let's dive right into the winners of this year's CTF. Um, so in first place we had Hammond fan club time and let's see if they uh is somebody representing Hammond. Here we go. Awesome. So if you come here, got

your prize. It's uh $1,500 in Amazon gift cards. There you go. There you go. Uh second place uh $750 t to team meow. Congratulations.

Yes. And finally, in third place is Stanford Applied

Cyber. Congratulations to all three of those teams for an excellent job. And congratulations to all the teams that participated. Again, this is uh our CTF um team is honestly one of the best I've seen. They spend a lot of time working on this. So I want to do just a major shout out to them specifically. Uh they are a team of seven or eight actually seven or eight um that work uh for several months. I mean many many months um building all the different CTF uh challenges and they try to tie in like actual things that have been going on in recent histories into these challenges. So it's it's just really amazing to uh to them and to all the work that they

do. So, let's give a major shout out just to our CTF puzzle

masters. So, we had uh 10 different villages this year. Uh, as you can see, lots of different stuff going on across the venue. Um, maybe we'll have some more next year. Um, so it's just really, you know, amazing that we can have all these villages. So, not only all the kind of talks and presentations and workshops and everything else going on, but you have all these hands-on villages where you can go and learn about these topics and figure out like, hey, okay, I want to do this. How can I learn more about this? And meet with people that are experts in these field that um and and see if you can get all your questions answered. Maybe even like get

a head start on, you know, changing career paths or something. Okay. So, we do our annual uh t-shirt charity every year. And so, as part of that, uh we um you know, if if you buy a t-shirt, we donate the net proceeds of that t-shirt to one of three charities. And so, uh we had three different charities this year. We had uh the California Community Foundation, EFF, and the Internet Archive. Um we and we raised almost $5,000 for that. Uh yes, just give major shout out for that. The numbers are not finalized. It's actually going to be more than this because this is when you know at press time had to had to cut the things off.

But uh for the California Community Foundation, we raised $845. EFF $1,619 and the Internet Archive $2,452. So really amazing that we're able to support all these amazing uh you know nonprofits um that do amazing work and we're happy to help. So let's just talk a little bit about the network and internet. Um we actually you know build our own we bring in our own network uh that to be able to provide Wi-Fi across three different floors here. And so uh just some interesting stats from this uh we actually do an uplink with webpass. We have a 1 gig uplink with webhouse. Uh so we could put an antenna on the roof basically just just for the conference.

Um you can see that you know the amount of downloaded and uploaded. We actually compared to last year uploaded a lot more but downloaded less which was interesting. Um so you know there's you know I don't know what's going on there but you know u we have about 500 more clients uh so DHP leases and such uh this year versus last year. Uh we added uh an additional 20 access points because again we had uh all the rest of AMC to cover. Uh fun fact just some fun facts 11 gigabytes of traffic just to LinkedIn and an additional six gigs uh to GitHub. So there's you know there's a lot of stuff going on. Definitely some

some connections being made on LinkedIn and definitely some you know development and other things happening on on GitHub. Also we had some uh some custom uh t-shirts. I wish we had a picture of them, but we had some custom t-shirts made. Oh, good. You can see, sorry. You can kind of see the back of that. These are these are custom knock t-shirts that we had made for the team. So, really cool. Cool. And yeah, so I mean, just major shout out to all the different volunteers um that were able to, you know, uh assist us this weekend and in the the times uh in the months previously as well. Uh it's just it takes a lot of folks to actually put

this show together. So I just wanted to do a major shout out to you know we have this weekend we had 174 different volunteers that were working this weekend um doing a variety of different roles. Uh these folks worked for a combined total of 330 shifts for a total of almost 1,500 manh hours worked. I mean that's a lot of time that people are giving up. Uh and so I just let's let's stop and give a shout out to all of our volunteers. And again, we always need more volunteers both, you know, year round running the event, but also next year as well. So, uh, if you are interested in helping out, uh, for next year just for

like the year- round stuff, you can go to bsidesf.org/job and sign up there. And then we'll open up just volunteers, uh, slots for bsides 2026 coming uh, you know, a couple of months before the event. What's the date? Uh yeah. Well, it's uh yeah, I have a slide for that, but yeah, so the uh the we we do we give out challenge coins recipients. Uh uh sorry, we give out challenge coins every year to kind of our volunteers that went above and beyond and did something special there. So, I just want to call out the 12 new challenge coin recipients that we had this year. Uh thank you to all that you did to contribute to making

this event a success. So, let's give a shout out to them.

And I just want to make sure to call out my team uh the folks that work year round to actually put Bides SF together. Uh we have 17 different leads who lead all kinds of across our different departments year round and additional 16 staffers uh who assisted with those. I'm going to call those out specifically. We have Alex, Korean, Crystal, David, Ian, Isaac Wenita uh uh Julia Lauren Megan Ming Ricky Ryan Sarah Sigant Tanya, and Tanuki. And on staff, we have Adah Cameron Dom Jason Jitters Jonathan, Mark, Michael, Mystery M, Rob, Ryan, Shu, Fig, Tom A, Tom G, Video Man, and Yash. So, major shout out to everybody on my team that that has uh

works year round on this event that gives up a lot of a lot of their this uh lot of their time to this uh excuse me, a lot of this time to putting uh B sites together. But last but certainly not least, uh this event would not be uh possible if not support for all of our different sponsors. So each one of the organizations has contributed something that has enabled us an aspect of this year's events. Um so just want to give a major shout out to all of our sponsors. So major so let's round of applause. Thank you. Cool. I called us I went ahead of myself so I already talked about this. Yes we

we definitely need more help. Um so besides.org/job cool use your help um with this. Uh we also have the program review team that actually is uh reviewing um the actual submissions and such. So if you want, you know, if you don't want to work year round, but like you're okay with like working for several months um on things, uh you can uh express interest via besf.org PRT and we'll reach out to you um from there. And again, it is critical that we need your feedback in order to actually keep improving this event. And so we do this via a couple of different ways. So you can go to bsadesf.org/feedback and provide general feedback uh which we read. We read every

single bit of feedback and then you also give uh talk specific feedback as well um on SCED uh and via the QR codes that were displayed at the end of every talk. And finally see you next year. Uh NE Biz SF 2026 will be March 21st and 22nd. Um, so hope to see all of your smiling faces once again and thank you again for coming to Besides San Francisco 2025. Thank you.