BSides Calgary 2025
This year, BSides Calgary was hosted May 1st and 2nd, and I was extremely happy to be able to go out and attend the event. I had missed out back in 2023 due to overlap with classes and only hearing about it a couple days prior, so this year I tried my best to make sure that wouldn’t be the case. I only caught a few of the speakers out of the 60+ that were there, but it was still a great opportunity to hear some amazing stories, advice, and viewpoints from industry professionals. In this article I want to talk about my experience attending the event and what I had learnt.
What is BSides Calgary?
BSides Calgary is a not-for-profit foundation that aims to promote cybersecurity and the networking of cybersecurity professionals in Calgary and across Alberta. BSides Calgary is a high caliber gathering for information security professionals, hackers, coders, students and the greater tech community. During our conferences, attendees share, discuss and learn about information security, privacy and technology. - BSides Calgary Security Foundation 2025
BSides secuity events happen all over the world, it is a community driven framework for building events that focus on information security, with the goal to expand and diversify the conversation surrounding that. There have been over 1000 events worldwide, with easily more than another 100 scheduled for this year. The first event was held back in 2009 in Las Vegas, meaning they have been around for almost 16 years; even pushing through and hosting virtual events throughout the pandemic. The first BSides event hosted in Calgary was back in 2016, and since then, they have hosted another five. BSides Calgary most often has multiple challenges, including a CTF, tons of different speakers, and so much more.
My Experience
Speakers
Out of the small handful of speakers I had the chance to listen to, three of them really caught my attention and stuck with me; even days after the event. A handful of the speakers I also already had the opportunity of listening to in the past, meaning I was more focused on hearing from some new presenters.
Jenny Radcliffe
Jenny Radcliffe, was the morning keynote speaker on the first day and spoke about her experience with physical penetration testing. She talked about how she got into it and what interested her about social engineering, and how that can be used to gain access to sensitive areas and information.
It was extremely insightful to hear different stories of what she has experienced over her years of working, and what she found fascinating with the type of work she does. Having taken a social engineering course while in school, it was nice to hear more from another industry professional since I find it’s been pretty uncommon to hear about this stuff while at in-person events. Jenny Radcliffe was an amazing speaker and had a great presentation to start such an event with, and set a really good tone for the rest of it.
Chris Timmons
Chris Timmons spoke on AI in penetration testing and exploring offensive security in OT (Operational Technology) networks. I found his presentation quite intriguing because AI has been a very hot topic over the last couple years and I wanted to see what it could be used for within an offensive area. I have seen my classmates combine AI with many different defensive tools but not the other way around.
Chris Timmons showed a handful of really interesting tools, talking about his experience with them, and showed us just how quickly everything can change and improve. He talked about tools like Labshock and PentestGPT, and even gave us a little demonstration using Labshock. His presentation introduced me to tools I had never seen or heard of, as well as broke down some pretty interesting ideas to be more understandable; it was awesome.
Tim McCreight
Tim McCreight talked about telling your security story, and it was by far the one that stuck with me the most. I’ve struggled with anxiety and public speaking for a long time, this began affecting my abilities to even just talk to people in general as well. However, since starting college I have pushed myself to work on it and become more comfortable with it, and over the past year I have actually started to feel and see improvements in myself.
Tim McCreight shared his experience with presenting, public speaking, and even just pitching ideas to board members. He talked about where he started, what sort of strategies helped him improve, and overall just gave some amazing advice that could even just simply be used for how to talk to people. As someone who has struggled at times with that, hearing someone who’s been in the industry for so long and who has also struggled with something similar at one point, share their experience and advice, was truly inspiring.
I’m not going to say I stepped out of there ready to present to hundreds of people and take on the world, but it did give me some better ideas on how I could maybe one day work to get there. Even though Tim McCreight didn’t give a more technical presentation like a lot of the other speakers, he gave an amazing presentation to a room packed full of people, and definitely inspired a lot of them; including myself.
Sponsors
In between catching up with my instructors and friends, and sitting in on some wonderful presentations, I had taken some time to speak with a handful of the event sponsors to learn more. Everyone there was extremely kind and willing to answer any and all questions we asked. It was a great opportunity to learn more about a ton of different companies within the cybersecurity space and get some advice (and some free swag). They talked with us about their products, company culture, and some even had challenges to test our knowledge.
Conclusion
Even though I hadn’t taken part in the CTF challenge and I chose to keep it pretty chill for the event, I still feel like I learnt and experienced a lot while there. It was an amazing event for hundreds of people to come together and discuss something we all enjoy so much. It was a great place to learn about new tools, network with people of similar interests, and explore some very intriguing topics. I hope after an amazing first experience, that I will be able to continue to attend them in the future, and encourage others to as well.