🎉 My First Cybersecurity Conference in Florida: BSides Orlando 2025

This past weekend, I attended BSides Orlando 2025 — my first cybersecurity event in Florida since moving here. It turned out to be a full day of learning, making connections, and hands-on fun.

📚 Roots & Reach of BSides

Before diving in, a bit of context: BSides began in 2009 in Las Vegas, when a few security folks (Mike Dahn, Jack Daniel, Chris Nickerson) recognized that excellent talk proposals were being rejected due to limited slots—and yet the community deserved more voices. From that spark, BSides expanded across the U.S. and globally. Every year, dozens of independent BSides events take place around the world, each with its own unique local flavor, yet unified by a shared community, accessibility, and a focus on knowledge sharing.

BSides Orlando 2025 carried that torch in Florida, hosted at Full Sail Live, Winter Park, just outside Orlando.

🛠️ Pre-Conference Workshops (Friday, Sept 26)

One of the cool things BSides offers is pre-conference workshops (held the day before the main event). These are more in-depth, hands-on training sessions that require separate registration. Security BSides Orlando

Past workshops have included topics like:

• Malware forensics (using Volatility 3)
• IoT hacking labs
• Threat modeling
• Signal decoding
• Hidden backdoors exploration

These sessions set the tone—participants arrive mentally warmed up for the more varied content in the leading conference. If you attended one, you can highlight a few techniques or surprises you encountered there.

🎤 Conference Talks & Schedule Highlights

The main day (Saturday) was busy. BSides Orlando’s schedule featured tracks covering auditing, offensive/defensive security, career development, and hacker villages.

While I can’t list every talk (there were many), here are some sessions and themes I found especially compelling:

• Keynotes / Headline talks
  These pull you out of the weeds—big ideas, threat landscapes, societal influences. It's good to quote a few key lines or insights that challenged your thinking.
• Offensive / Red Team Demos
  Stories of real-world penetration tests, exploit chains, bypass techniques, or hardware hacking tend to resonate—especially when the speaker demonstrates code or a live demo.
• Defensive / Blue Team Strategies
  Tools, detections, and incident response methods—some talks delved into how defenders can realistically harden their stack, not just theoretically.

• Career & Personal Development
  Discussions about breaking in, career pivots, mentorship, burnout, and surprise paths. These always generate the best “chat afterward” moments.

• Village Talks & Short Demos
  Each of the on-site “villages” (Soldering, Lockpicking, Social Engineering) had its own mini-sessions, demos, and lightning talks. Good for spotting niche ideas you might not see in the main tracks.

Here are a few that the event listed ahead of time in the Social Engineering Adventure village:

• “Can a Hacker Murder a City?” by Patrick Laverty
• “The Voice of Deception: How Vishing Exploits Human Emotion” by Rosa Rowles
• “Is it Real or Is it Memorex — Memorex is a Deepfake” by James McQuiggan, Security BSides Orlando,

If you attended any of these, you could pick a quote or two, or relate how it changed your thinking (e.g., “After Rosa’s talk, I started rethinking how I handle impersonation risk in my own systems.”).

🎯 Event Activities, Villages & Side Attractions

One of the things that makes BSides special is that it’s not just talk after talk — there’s doing, playing, and exploring baked in. From the BSides Orlando event page:

Here are some of the standout activities:

Villages & Interactive Spaces

• Soldering Village
  Where I volunteered! Help attendees solder blinking LEDs, badges, and small circuits—even if they’ve never used a soldering iron before.

• Lockpick Village (LPV)
  Get hands-on with locks, pick them, and learn how locks break from beginner pin tumblers to advanced setups.
• Social Engineering Adventure
  Delve into the human side of hacking: OSINT challenges, phishing contests (even vs AI bots), vishing, trust-building techniques, and live demos.
• Career Village
  Resume reviews, mock interviews, a job board, professional headshots, networking games (BINGO, scavenger hunts), and structured ways to meet folks.
• Community Village & Sponsor Village
  Meet local community groups, see what they’re building, chat with sponsors, check demos, and collect swag.

Competitions & Contests

• Sunshine Capture the Flag (CTF)
  A 48-hour global competition (online and in-person). Challenges include pwn, reversing, web, crypto, scripting, and surprises. Top in-person teams are recognized in the closing ceremony.
• Contests & Chill
  A more relaxed space:
  • Fox Hunts tutorials and contests
  • RFID badge cloning demos
  • Mini CTF / puzzles (Orbital CTF)
  • Sticker swap table
  • Games, puzzles, and a “breathing corner” to reset between intense talks.

After Party

After the main talks end, the party begins. The After Party took place on Saturday from 7 pm to 10 pm at The Celeste Hotel, Celestial Ballroom. Expect:

• Board games
• Music
• Relaxed networking (awkward dance moves guaranteed!)
• A cash bar (alcoholic & non-alcoholic)
  This is a great moment to let your guard down and meet people you missed during the day.

🤝 My Experience (Attendee + Volunteer)

Here’s how my day played out — and what I want readers to take away:

Volunteering in the Soldering Village

• I got to pair with attendees: beginners who had never touched a soldering iron, and more advanced folks tweaking circuits.
• Helping people see their first LED blink is a magical moment.
• It gave me credibility and conversation starters: “Oh, you soldered too? What did you build?”

Talks & Inspiration

• I made a point to attend a mix: one offensive demo, one defensive tool talk, and at least one from the Social Engineering track.
• In particular, Rosa’s “Voice of Deception” talk made me rethink how trust is built (and destroyed) in seconds.
• I scribbled ideas in my notebook: things to try in my own IoT/AI hacking labs, or topics I might propose someday.

Conversations & Community

• I met professionals in the Florida cybersecurity scene (not just in Orlando) and exchanged contact information.
• I was thrilled to find fellow Brazilians at the event—they shared stories of arriving, learning, and contributing to tech communities here.

• During breaks, people asked me about my courses (IoT, car hacking, AI hacking). I received good feedback, which motivates me to refine and push them further.

Side Moments

• Visiting the Lockpick Village: watching a seasoned picker solve a 7-pin lock in minutes.
• Observing Social Engineering demos: the psychology, trust, and minimal signals humans respond to.
• Taking photos of badge swaps, LED circuits, and small groups in hallway chats.
• Hanging out at the After Party—chatting over games, hearing war stories, planning future collabs.

🚀 Reflections & Next Moves

Walking away from BSides Orlando, I feel:

• Recharged — the energy, the curiosity, the hands-on vibe is intoxicating.
• Motivated — I want to do more talks, push my courses, maybe lead a village someday.
• Grounded — cybersecurity is still people + systems, and events like this keep you humble and inspired.

If you’re curious, I invite you to my YouTube Channel (especially for car hacking, IoT, and AI hacking) — it's created by someone who likes getting their hands dirty just like at BSides.