BSLV22-CLOSING

so i'm gabriel bassett i am not dichotomy i am a pale comparison he is the one who normally re leads prose versus joe's and has done an amazing job putting together an amazing team to assist amazing people um if you don't know pros versus joe's is unlike your stereotypical ctf um we have live ranges we have live blue teams evening live systems and being attacked by live red teams and it really is an impressive thing to see the teams mature to learn and to see the camaraderie particularly provided by all the teams and so my opportunity up here is to thank all those people who make it happen starting with the blue team players who

are willing to come in to practice for weeks ahead of time to play through the highs and the lows they make the game and they make it great also i want to thank their captains who are professionals who are patient with them are kind are understanding and help everyone learn we also have a red team who by all accounts could go in and just attack only and instead our red team sees this as a educational opportunity to help the blues learn and they really do act not as so much as an aggressor but as part of the staff and then of course the gold team i'm here we had two or three people i especially want to thank

lauren rogers who stepped in at the last minute because we're a little short staffed but we also had a half dozen gold team members from all over the us dialing in watching systems and running it all in all it's a huge effort by a lot of people but it touches a lot of lives being my first time running it was also my first time to experience sitting at the front desk and having maybe every hour to someone come up and say hey i was a player last year or three years ago or five years ago and it's the best experience i've ever had i learned things that i never learned anywhere else made a huge difference in my life

and in that sense um ctf and prose versus joe's is a microcosm of the overall conference the way besides las vegas touches so many lives and so with that it is all of us that really deserve credit for all we do in helping people so i'll turn that back over [Music] uh next up xanadu is going to give us an update on the silent auction

first time ever we've actually had everybody show up who bid the max amount except for one we want to see if they're possibly here let's see swat cyber sarah no who wants to start the auction at 45. this is by the way the b-side sao paulo

yeah who's going to give us 50 for this 50 in the back 55 going going once for 50 going twice sold to the guy in the back 50 50 bucks thanks for making this quick all right just an overview we were able to raise over 2k this year over 35 items some wonderful sponsors and lots of drop-off items so not only the sponsors but participants dropping off items for everybody to bid on so thank you [Applause] next cindy is going to share a few words

hey everyone um first of all i'm gonna not cry because it's been a really cool couple of days and i hope everybody's gotten the same things out of it that i have and just being able to see our faces and be here because it's been a different couple of years man i've just been literally walking around smiling you can't see it under the mask but just smiling for two days and it's very rewarding so i just want to share with everyone that i mean that's where i'm sitting right now from that chair knowing that we went ahead and pulled off this event in a little bit of a different way um very grateful for the ability to be here

we've gone all gone through some craziness i'm sure we're not we're dealing with and i hate saying the term because it seems so cliche now the new normal um but we're working on getting back to where we can establish our own normal we do not have the numbers it was probably evident this year that we've had in the past kind of planned it that way we kind of wanted to ease in a little bit i believe i was told from a donor perspective we had about 1600 badges the donations were made for so that's pretty cool that's not including our volunteers our staff our speakers their plus ones so there was a lot of folks here um

i can't guess the number because people flow in and out but i think we had a pretty solid showing for the first year back in person since 2019 um like i said this past few years has been like outside of any kind of threat model any of us ever or most of us i should say i think i had somebody tell me that they actually did a tabletop exercise with a threat model representing this item was there anything i had considered um i was asking some of the staff and some of the folks in the in you know within the common ground what or in a middle ground excuse me what they thought some of the good takeaways were from

this year and what they got out of it and a lot of what i heard was just the ability to be around the people again and to talk about us in a common language and to nerd out right that's what we do we nerd out and we teach it each other that's the whole goal of this conference there was a real significant number of new faces even without the mask right we had a lot of new folks and this is not just people who are attending and participating but people who are volunteering they've never been to besides las vegas yet they were still volunteering that to me is so amazing that means regardless of what's been

happening in the world they're still the world's words still getting out and how we do our thing and it's pretty amazing incredible i love that we've got first-time staff that were brought on at the blink of a hat so thanks for those of you who have managed to fill those roles we've got a stage manager person around here who just like oh i talked to you at the beginning of the week and we're down somebody so can you help out and she stepped up and said so next year let's try this so that just brought made me feel warm at heart um as we move forward we want to be a little bit bigger than we were this year

a little bit closer to where we are in 2019 maybe we'll hit that the reality is is that we're going to be back here at the tuscany we're going to be home this is where we belong i drove up on saturday and i went to valet my car and they asked me for my name i said last name's jones oh you must be cindy i thought it was because they had been notified on who was showing up early it wasn't it hadn't happened yet this guy just remembered me from 2019 or the last time i validate a car that to me is mind-blowing i mean this is crazy so yeah we're staying here for the fourth

you know for the foreseeable future we're staying at the tuscany that's just one example we've got amazing help with the staff here they're incredible as well i don't know if any of you recognize lance but he's been here forever so if you've been here you'll recognize lance he's always here so here we are we're at the tuscany next year kelly our amazing ceo who you'll hear a little bit from in a minute um she's gonna be signing contracts tomorrow we'll be providing that information as far as dates and when things will be coming available uh after defcon announces their formal dates and as we do every year um i think that's on sunday after they

announced it a closing on sunday so we'll have that information then one thing i have to say is our staff all of our staff are just amazing they work throughout the year when we made finally made the call that we were going to move forward and the board had a vote and said yes let's do this event i think we all really kind of wanted to i think a lot of us kind of needed to and it helped put us in a position of feeling back to our own normal right um the staff rallied so hard i mean we just got things done a little bit different new gaps uh we got some areas where we're going

to go ahead and improve but every single person on staff has been just amazing but there are a couple of specific staff members i really want to talk about um one of our folks in our uh what do we call it quarter past we don't call it quartermaster what is it hugh branch thank you in our q branch which is the holder of all goods um aj aj is a local and aj works she's amazing i don't know if she's here right now but aj has been helping us organize and test electronics in the storage facility for the past i don't know two months and she's been she's been a rock here locally within las vegas and it's so

appreciated uh mr glass has been challenged over and over again and keeping our website up and making it look cool so thank you so much [Applause] and dealing with all the changes because there are a lot of changes we have one dark one to thank for the beautiful graphics and all of our design elements and always amazing and we wouldn't have the same look or feel without her i mean this is this is amazing uh another person i really want to go ahead and recognize is melissa melissa is working speaker ops sponsor ops sorry sponsor ops oops it was an s word melissa i don't think planned on being as quite of a uh the amazing

resource as she ended up being but we are so grateful for her be both leading up to and during the the event so thank you so much melissa um one other person i want to mention is lolski he ran speaker ops i got that right right uh lolski ran speaker up solo for the first time in the role in a crazy environment so lolski definitely deserves some props is helping helping out speakers two more mentions to the staff who were supposed to be here who couldn't be here but yet for whatever reasons um but they still were rocking it from home helping out we have a couple like somebody from registration we have uh something

somebody from from uh contests and events and we had a few different folks who just couldn't make it for whatever reason and they were still able to help out on the back end so thanks guys i hope you're watching this okay now's the hard one um the last person i want to mention is jack [Laughter] so he's why we're here right he's one of he's the ultimate grandfather of the b-side's events um he's the reason that most besides events happen really his he's an inspiration he is a motivator and he wasn't here because it's a family obligation regardless he's always been supportive he's always been he's been jacked i mean he's here always with us in his

heart i know that and he's definitely here he's present this is jack you know i mean we still honor him just about every year and i don't think that should ever stop but that

so jack if you see this just know that you are very loved and you are very missed and we hope to see you soon all right last thing i want to say if anybody in this room or anybody watching the stream has any comments or criticisms or suggestions for way of doing things better different new ideas we would love to hear that we may not be able to expand by our numbers but we always want to improve quality right so one of the things we'd love for you to do if you have any comments we don't do formal surveys honestly it's got an overhead we just can't maintain but we can look at our emails

so you can always reach us through the typical ways you can go on twitter dms on twitter all of our dms are open so we're fine you can slide in um we've got the uh you know our we have some contact emails on our site and if you don't feel like hitting the major staff people that are all looking at that you can hit me directly it's cindy bsideslv.org and i will be more than happy to take you know to have a moment to you know discuss chat back and forth whatever the case may be so let's always improve our environment here and keep some new things coming in because security isn't stagnant either should we

be right and that i think that's it and i just want to drag kelly up here who is our ceo and i'd really love to start off a solid what round of applause for her because she takes a mass this year like i said

i got these horseshoe earrings to match the theme and every time i take off my mask i hook my mask on them it's fabulous anyway um i don't have much to say i want to thank everybody who came i want to thank everybody for complying with the mask restrict requirement thank you all and putting up with the loud air filters um i want to thank everybody all of our sponsors for supporting us all of the donors for supporting us and most of all i want to thank my staff who are some of the most tremendous people i've ever met we have rallied around each other and supported each other for the last three years kept

the faith [Music] kept each other going when it was really grim um and put together a show uh in a very short amount of time when we weren't sure a couple of months ago we were gonna be able to do it they are incredible and i love you um [Applause] thank you to the volunteers for being flexible for taking on all kinds of jobs um thank you to the board for supporting all that we do and thank you to the speakers who are the reason we're here to get that knowledge out there to help you build your careers and to uh to find out some cool so thank you so much everybody

all right so what's left tonight is the pool party so that's gonna start at 10 pm or after the rain whichever comes later um so pick up pool toys uh from the pool party courtesy of our wonderful sponsor uh pool party sponsor microsoft security services um or a towel courtesy of panther labs thanks to them and thanks to all of our sponsors this year for making this happen yes well so one last one last thing right for me um you know we're all really sad that jack can't be here uh but everyone on the staff knows this uh jack says you know what are we doing here we're changing people's lives so anyone who came just as a regular

attendee if you had a conversation with anyone if you helped anyone out you change people's lives so thank you for coming here and being part of this and i'll see you guys at the pool