My Cyber Security Club’s time at Bsides Charm 2024
The weekend of April 20-21 the 2024 Bsides Charm conference was hosted in Towson, Maryland. This conference is hosted yearly to bring together organizations and people in the cyber security community. This year’s conference featured over a dozen sponsor tables, multiple specialized rooms, a schedule full of speakers, and more. All these great events and my cyber security club all got to go and receive t-shirts for free thanks to Bsides’ generosity.
Unfortunately we were only able to make it to the conference on Sunday, as on Saturday we had a capture the flag event organized (which was just as great of an experience as Bsides Charm). Despite missing the main day of events, my club had a great time exploring Bsides and I will recount my experience there.
Before the keynote speech of the day, we visited a few sponsor tables. The first table we visited was manned by Trimarc. Trimarc is a security assessment company that provides detailed security assessments to systems and recommends security enhancements. They also partnered with another company called Black Hills to create an expansion to a Dungeons & Dragons type card game called Backdoors & Breaches that Black Hills produced. Black Hills was another table we visited after learning about this. Black Hills focuses on information security training for businesses and penetration testing. Thus, they produced Backdoors & Breaches to aid companies in finding a fun way to teach cyber security.
After viewing some more tables we decided to listen to the keynote speaker of the day Melanie Ensign. Melanie Ensign is the founder and CEO of Discernible, a company that specializes in consulting for communications for security and privacy teams. Her speech focused on how to communicate effectively within your organization to accomplish your goals. It was an interesting speech that I hope to apply to my career going forward.
Another speech that we went to was about getting your first cyber security job. This speech my group was much more interested in hearing. It was an intriguing speech to listen to, as the speaker is only 18 years old. Sully Vickers, who started teaching himself cyber security at the age of 16 then managed to find a job as a cyber researcher and developer at Leidos. Leidos is a firm of cyber security experts that aid other businesses in navigating the technical field. His accomplishment is extremely impressive, and he offered great advice about putting yourself out there, networking, making a brand for yourself, and learning as much as you can. We managed to talk with him afterwards and he was extremely kind and passionate when chatting with us.
Another fun activity we went to was the lock picking village. This “village” as they called it was a room with tables full of lock picking equipment and the organizers would train you on how to pick locks. They had trainee locks, weak locks, difficult locks, and even hand cuffs. I managed to pick a few 4 or 5 pin locks but could not do much higher than that. It was not as difficult as I was expecting, but at the same time trying anything with more than a few pins was intense. We spent a good amount of time here and it was the last thing we did before leaving.
One event my group missed by not going on Saturday was the hiring village. Sadly, this means we did not get to talk to potential hiring opportunities or take advantage of any offerings they had. However, we did get to speak to a business table that told us about internship opportunities they were opening over the summer, which caught our attention.
Overall, we got to connect with a lot of people in the field, were given key advice for success, and had a great time. I look forward to the next conference they may have and will keep my eyes open for any other security conferences nearby.