Background

I spent a week in Sydney from the weekend before Hack.Sydney to the weekend of Bsides Sydney! :airplane:

It worked out well as I could catch up with old friends and even attend a friends wedding :smile:

Hack Sydney 2024

This conference was the smaller of the two, and aimed more towards industry professionals, and less at students.

It ran for two days at the National Maritime Museum, honestly pretty cool venue.

museaum

Speaker Time :fire:

The main reason I was provided sponsored flights to Sydney :sunglasses: I had a talk titled “Using OSINT and Fingerprinting to Upgrade your WebApp Pentesting”!
There is a summary blog post up here

It was my first time speaking for a larger audience, but I was grateful that I had received lots of advice from my seniors within Sekuro which paid off.

Despite me being nervous leading up to it, I think I executed really well overall :relieved:

speaker

Speakers got cool perks such as:

  • Speaker lunch - the organisers shouted lunch at the museum cafe, and I got to chat with Vishal and John to learn more about what it takes to run a conference
  • Speaker giftbag - nice gift as a thank you from the conference
  • Boat Tour - we got a special guided boat tour of the HMAS Vampire
    (they didn’t allow us to take pictures)

stall

BSides Sydney 2024

This one was right after HackSydney, but located at TAFE Meadowbank, the really nice thing was that despite being only one day, the relatively inexpensive conference ticket included:

  • catered lunch
  • small pre-made badge with LEDs and timers
  • CTF
  • locksport section
  • career village

It was funny to see some of the speakers from Hack.Syd were there too!

Manning the stall Part 2!

  • This one was definitely more interesting experience compared to Hack.Sydney as there were more students!
  • There were also students who told me my previous day’s talk was good haha, even I’m though I was just another attendee that day
  • Also setting up the stall lets you get first dibs on the swag from other tables, shoutout to SquareX for the cool stickers and comic book

swag stall food

Conclusion

All in all, I really enjoyed both events. I did not regret taking the plunge to speak, as speaking is really good for the portfolio!

I was happy to get to meet industry peers from other areas of security too throughout the few days, some of whom even travelled from other countries to speak here!

I also felt proud of how far I’ve come starting out as a student as well, and being able to help guide current students on their own journey through small pieces of advice too. :sparkle: