Dual tracks, a decompilation keynote, and workshop rooms: BSides Brisbane 2024

Saturday 13 July 2024, back at QUT Gardens Point in Z Block. For us behind the scenes, the day was a juggling act: Track 1 in GP-Z-411, Track 2 in GP-Z-401, workshops humming in the side rooms, Nomad’s CTF winding up before Josh and Brodie brought it home at close-out.

We were lucky to host Dr Cristina Cifuentes for the keynote. Decompilation isn’t something you see every week, and the talk landed exactly the way we hoped: technical, historical, and still relevant to the tools people use today.

Alongside the two tracks we had hands-on corners that matched the energy of the talks: hardware / PLC-style challenges (and badge RF Easter eggs if you read the booklet), DFIR and APNIC workshop space, and a CTF that mixed jeopardy boards with an Active Directory-flavoured lab for teams that wanted something closer to day-job tradecraft.

The numbers we’re carrying forward

We closed ticketing with 696 of you registered, and 504 check-ins on the day. Eleven sponsors stepped up, although we were down on dollars compared to a few years prior (roughly half of what we saw in 2023), which honestly stung when we were dreaming up venue dressing and extra touches. What we did raise covered the essentials: core costs, swag, and t-shirts, and we’re grateful for every logo on that list.

Queensland Government came in as Platinum again: not just funding, but in-kind help too. That meant promotion through state channels (including boosting visibility for folks on the funded Certificate IV cyber pathway), and people from the public sector side joining workshops and hallway conversations. That partnership made a real difference; we’re hoping it keeps rolling into future years.

If you want the artefact we printed for the day, here’s the 2024 booklet.

Presenters

Thank you to everyone who spoke. You built the heart of the conference.

Presenter	Title
Cristina Cifuentes	Keynote: From Student of Compilation to Mother of Decompilation -- 30 years edition
Ryan Williams	Simboxes & Scams - The long road to SS7
John Uhlmann	Kernel ETW is the best ETW
Cameron Fairbairn	From Past to Present: The Evolution of Command and Control
Warren James	Detection Engineering, the why's, what's and how it fits into the bigger picture
Andy Yang	A Journey from Pentest to Red Team Operation
Jess 'GirlGerms' Dodson	When it SIEMs like you're doing it all wrong…
Kaif Ahsan & Kumar Soorya	Live Hacking Marathon: Breaking The Supply Chain
Kelsey-Lee Stay	There's a 'U' in security team
Jim Burger	Is the future really "passwordless"? Exploring WebAuthN and Passkeys
Ben Gittins	Getting Comfortable in the Grey: an argument for generalists in cyber security
Cole Cornford	AppSec Tales and Fails
Nick Young	Cyber Security Strategy: A 3 Step Guide
Bec Caldwell	Ecosystems of Safety: Pollen, Perspectives, and Predicting Cyber Threats
Paul McCarty	The "Holy Trinity" of Offensive Security Practices: How bug bounty, penetration testing and red teaming can work together to deliver security "Nirvana" for your organisation
Kristine Sihto	Clash of the Jargon - Simplify for understanding
Andrew Rooke	Alternative Cyber Careers - Solution and Enterprise Security Architecture
Nicole Murdoch	Where Inventors Need to Start

Sponsors

Below are the sponsors. Thank you, all of you, for backing BSides Brisbane 2024.

Photos from the day

A handful of moments we’re happy to have saved from 2024.