Here we are, August 2024. Exactly 1 year past the creation of Hexxed BitHeadz. Back on our way to BSides and DefCon Las Vegas, same as we’ve done every year for several years now. Well… Not quite the same…

Assembling these articles every month has proven to keep us open minded and deeply involved in learning the world of cyber. This year, we get to stand at BSides, and provide a talk around one of our articles, “A New Host Touches the Beacon“. We are very appreciative of the opportunity BSides has provided us so early in our existence.

We have continued to post a new article on a monthly cadence as planned, and as part of celebrating our success so far in our first year, we will not be releasing any content other than this message for the month of August. We want all of our focus on attending BSides and DefCon this year in Vegas, and are excited to celebrate with our friends and readers.

We would like to end this article by saying thank you for those who have helped us in any way on this journey. We feel blessed with where we are, and are excited for our journey, near and far, challenges and successes.

Below, we are showing off our stickers we are bringing this year to Vegas! Including the dedicated Kevin Mitnick stickers we introduced last year, a sticker dedicated to our talk at BSides this year, a holograph sticker, a sticker dedicated to fellow coffee drinkers, a coaster and a few others.

UPDATE 9/4/2024

Well it’s been a few weeks now returning from BSides / Las Vegas, wanted to do a follow up piece, just took awhile to get to it.

BSIDES

The biggest thing I should speak to here is the experience I had with giving my first CON talk, which was at BSides! Izzny wanted to submit our A New Host Touches the Beacon post for a talk, and sure enough, BSides Las Vegas was generous enough to welcome our project on their platform. Since this was the first time Hexxed BitHeadz was to do any kind of talk, they even hooked us up with a fantastic mentor through the process. We met with our mentor about once a week for several weeks to prepare everything. They even have some time set aside the day before BSides, allowing all speakers to come in and get some last minute feedback. I totally took advantage of this offer, and I will say it was worth it. The last minute feedback was very helpful, I had to make some needed updates to the slide deck.

Overall, the talk went really well, I wish I wouldn’t have had to stick to my notes so tightly, but that is something I can work on for next time. Most importantly, I didn’t Fuck It Up, and was relieved when it was over. There were quite a few questions at the end, really good questions. Like “Have we uploaded our malicious mode to Nexus, see if it bypass the virus scan?” -No…. tempting, but no. I couldn’t imagine someone actually downloading this mod, and causing beacon call back lol. I’m too chicken to try it.

I really do want to give credit to the BSides crew for this experience, they are on top of their game and were so great to talk to throughout this process. There was a ton of work done for just a 20 minute window for the talk, and it was a lot fun to go through each stage of the process with them. If any of you reading this was at my talk, please say hi! I would love to connect and hear if you enjoyed the presentation!

With that, I’ll wrap up the BSides experience with this: My Skyrim wall piece with my BSides “presenter” lanyard, the 2 things that made this year possible 🙂

DEFCON

In the very off chance you glorious assholes from from the reddit DefCon meet up at the circle bar come across this, thanks for a the “1st time speaking at a Con initiation drinks” (If that indeed is a real thing) It was a blast meeting all you and hanging out!

I kicked off my DefCon by volunteering at the Red Team Village again, as I did the year prior. As this is now my 5th consecutive DefCon, I see myself looking for more opportunities to contribute a little of my time to help the con. The community is the best, and it continues to amaze me how they can pull off such a great experience year after year.

I do not really see the value in repeating as much detail as I can in this blog about what I did over DefCon, as it’s pretty similar really. Volunteer, see talks, buy stuff, hang out with the smartest, coolest, funniest community on planet.