BSides Cheltenham.

[Wayne]

Let me start by saying how much I've enjoyed attending BSides events these past few months. Some have been close to home, some far away a hotel stay is needed. This one was pretty good, with just a 2 hour drive each way, accompanied by an audio book to keep me company on the journey. Before I'd even gotten into the building I bumped into someone I knew. My talk was at 4pm so I had plenty of time to listen to the other talks first, and there were some really good ones! I'm going to single one out as my favourite, though as I said before they were all good. The talk in question was "Padlocks and plausible pretences: the break in blueprint" and was about ways to quite literally walk into buildings without being questioned as part of their security being tested. Unfortunately some of the other talks I wanted to attend were on at the same time as mine so I'm going to have to hope they got recorded. My talk went pretty well. I had a 50 minute slot, so I was finally able to give the full version of it as intended, and even added in an extra bit due to the reaction a story got when I told it during lunch at the previous BSides. Even better, one of the people I told it to was a volunteer at this one and was in the room when I gave it. At this point I plan on retiring the talk, at least from BSides. I have however started work on a new one and put it forward for another BSides event. The next one is going to talk more about baiting, and is something I've wanted to do for quite a while now. Fingers crossed it gets accepted.

One final word on the event. Everyone was great, really friendly the talks were good and the name badges they gave out were awesome. As a speaker I received one with the electronics already installed, but you could buy a kit with the components and install them yourself, with the money raised going to a very worthy charity. Want to see the badge in question? Of course you do. There's a button the back that changes the LED pattern, but this is the default "even then odd" pattern.