Security BSides Northern Virginia

Volunteering at my first Security BSides Northern Virginia was such a great experience. I got to be a speaker wrangler, introduce amazing speakers, and even placed in the top 5 of a mini networking competition where I learned more about Wireshark and JA4 (and won a cyber mug ☕). Huge thanks to Marcelle Lee, Peter Gaudiomonte and Betty DuBois for hosting that session and making it such a fun learning experience. Met wonderful people and left inspired to keep showing up in this community. Can’t wait for my next BSides conference!

👩🏻🎓 I graduated from Hacker University Security BSides Northern Virginia 2025! 📚 Such a fun theme this year! It started with the keynote from John Hammond who lived up to the hype! Great advice for finding what you love in this huge yard sale that is cyber security today. 🦙 I enjoyed the llama scavenger hunt, working with great people and even winning the raffle! The pi will be put to good use. 🥧 🧌 MetaCTF provided another great quality CTF, as always. I barely pulled myself away from it so I could see some talks. 🕷️ Like last year, there were a lot of insightful presentations to chose from. I'll just mention the fun glimpse inside Unit 221B's work in "Inside the Web: Tracking Scattered Spider & Splinter Groups Through Telegram" by Ben C. and Chris W., and the thought provoking "What If We Could Make Dark Web Criminal Influencers Unbelievable?" by Tim Pappa. ❤️ Hanging out with the amazing people from our community was the cherry on top! It was so good seeing everyone again! Thank you Sophia Fadli and the team for another successful conference! See you at the big one next year! #HackerU #BSidesNova2025

I finally got to attend BSides Nova after hearing about it for so long and now I get the hype! I spent Friday in the CTI 101 workshop held by Andy Piazza and John Doyle, which packed a ton of useful takeaways on structured intel analysis. On Saturday, my team worked hard and did well in the MetaCTF challenge, and I couldn’t resist jumping into the AI CTF solo! Chaotic, hilarious, and genuinely one of the most fun challenges I’ve done yet. The talks were just as impressive: “Inside the Web: Tracking Scattered Spider & Splinter Groups Through Telegram” by Chris W. and Ben C. offered a fascinating look into adversary tracking, while “Don’t be LLaMe – The Basics of Attacking LLMs in Your Red Team Exercises” by Brent Harrell made AI exploitation both accessible and wildly entertaining. I always walk away from these conferences wishing they were longer, or that I could do more. I'm definitely going to spend time upskilling so I can crush the CTF and then have more time for other things. 😂 (If you have better tips on how to optimize conference time, please share!) Thanks to #BSidesNoVA for the memories! Ayan Islam Geraldine O. Tina G. Nicholas Rooks Blain Hailemariam

Fantastic catching up with everyone at Security BSides Northern Virginia! The day was packed with high-quality content, and MetaCTF provided interesting challenges. A highlight for me was a session on Apple CarPlay flaws, right alongside the awesome pinball machine hacking group demonstration and talk.