BSides PR

This past weekend BSides PR was held in the Puerto Rico Convention Center, this is the first Security Hacking Con in the island. Most conferences before this one have been vendor focus or the ones by ISSA had been about purely compliance. The hacker is ethos is to question the why of things, to find out how it works and to share this information. I'm so proud I was let to help with some of the conference and be able to speak at it, the conference was a total success. Before I continue I wan to to first give credit to the heroes of the conference that made it all possible and that it was executed with no problems:

  • Jose Quiñones - He took the rains of everything in the conference and was the fearless leader of the team. He kept it moving forward and took the greets risks for it to happen.
  • Jose Arroyo - He always provided the "Lets go do it" attitude and his passion never waiver and kept motivating the team to go forward and worked hard getting permits, paper work and other matters so it would happen. 
  • Johanna Martinez - What can I say, this lady did every thing to make this happen, contacted media, contacted sponsors, organized, wrote articles in news papers, always had a hard charging attitude, even when others where down she kept charging and rallied the troops. If Jose Quiñones is the brains, Jose Arroyo the passion of the con this lady is the heart. 
  • Angel Colon and Daniel Mattei - This where our AV guys, I have to say other than my projector at my workshop there where 0 glitches for the speakers to do their presentations, this guys went to bed late and woke up very early to make sure everything worked as it should for all the presentations, without their hard work it would have not have gone so well. 

Then next set of thanks go to the sponsors, we have to say it came to a shock for us how many local big technology companies and even small ones said no to us, even when we offered trade, even do that happened the purpose of the conference is to build community and for this I have to tanks:

  • Fortinet - Silver
  • Tenable Security - Bronze
  • SDIF del Caribe - Bronze
  • Mocapp Bronze - Bronze
  • Black Hills Information Security - Bronze
  • BG Consulting - Broze
  • CSPPR - Broze
  • Twins Computers Design - Bronze
  • Intech - Donor
We also had companies that supported us in other ways from helping with some costs to providing services and process for attendees, we are super grateful to them:
  • Accuvant Labs
  • ISSA PR Chapter
  • El Nuevo Dia newspaper
  • Executrain
  • eLearnSecurity
  • Qualys

I do have to say I'm supper impressed with the speaker lineup we where able to have for our first conference, I do have to say thanks to many of them when I contacted them I was thinking that most would say no but they where more than happy, also some of the CFP we got where so good we had problems saying no to the ones we could not fit. The list of presentations where:

  • Royce Davis: Owning Computer Systems (English)
  • Moises Delgado: APN functions for e-commerce security (Spanish)
  • Jaime A. Restrepo-Gomez: Forensic Analysis on iOS Devices (Spanish)
  • Vaagn Toukharian: WebSockets unPlugged (English)
  • Emilio Escobar: Resurrecting Ettercap: Past, Present and Future of Malicious Routing (Spanish)
  • Michael Landeck: Overcoming Objections to Security in the SDLC with a Special Section on Weaponizing QA Test Scripts (English)
  • Jose Hernandez: Don’t be Fooled, Scanning Web Applications is not Pen-Testing (Spanish)
  • Jayson Street: Love letters to Frank Abagnale (English)
  • Jaime A. Restrepo-Gomez: Pentesting in the POST-PC era (Spanish)
  • Chris Campbell: Addition by Subtraction: How Networked Appliances Affect your Security Posture (English)
  • Matt Graeber: Practical Persistence With PowerShell (English)
  • Albert Campa: The Anomaly of when a vulnerability assessment is better than a pentest. (English)
  • Eric Milam & Martin Bos: Advanced Phishing Tactics – Beyond user awareness(English)

I even had the chance to meet Royce Davis, I have been a super fan of his work and the blog he contributes to pentestgeek.com , got a chance to spend time with Raphal, Erick, Martin, Chris, Emilio, Valerie and the other speakers, best thing even was the sharing of ideas and seen new people to the industry asking them question and them taking of their time to help, this has to be the most humble lineup of speaker I have seen in any con and I'm happy it was this one. You rock!

The videos of the presentation should be out soon and those that took my PowerShell WorkShop thanks for the great time :)