Our largest turnout yet: BSides Brisbane 2025 in the numbers

12 July 2025, QUT Gardens Point, Z Block. Another year, another early start for the volunteer crew and another line at registration before the tracks kicked off.

We’ll remember 2025 as our biggest day so far: about 749 of you through the door, eighteen talks across two tracks, eleven sponsors on the banner, and five exhausted volunteers. The programme had a bit of everything (research, identity, OT / shadow-OT, hunting, AppSec, AI risk, stego, IR) because that’s who shows up to BSides: builders, defenders, leaders, and students, all in one building.

CTF & hardware village

Nomad’s CTF was back: jeopardy-style challenges plus the Active Directory lab for teams that had pre-registered. The hardware / IoT village stayed in the mix too. There’s something about letting people touch the problem that slides alone can’t quite replace.

Booklet

We’ll drop a link to the printed booklet in this section once we’ve archived the final PDF alongside the other years.

Presenters

Huge thanks to this year’s speakers. You raised the bar again.

Presenter	Title
Thomas Pitt	Keynote: Bypassing Intel CET with Counterfeit Objects
Cameron Fairbairn	Breaking and Defending Entra ID: Recon, Privilege Escalation, and Real-World Attack Paths
Rhiana Cooke	Shadow of a Doubt - A Deep-Dive into Shadow OT
Brent Muir	Deception in Depth Mindset; How to Capture an APT
Tatsuya Hasegawa	Threat Hunting with Better Data Visualisation
Adriana	Fortify Your WordPress: Essential Security Strategies
Daniel Ting	Better AppSec through Better DevEx
James Bannan	From Head Tattoos to Malware: A History of Steganography
DJ	Novel Threats & Nation States: Mastering the ABC's of Incident Response
Ben Gittens	Developer Centric Security: AppSec for 2025 and Beyond
Dr Joel Panther	Do Not Obey in Advance — Cyber Security in the Fight Against Techno-Authoritarianism
Abby & Alex	Pretty Privilege — How Pleasing Words and Visuals Will Help You Get Ahead
Sam Gillespie	Beyond Passwords: The Present and Future War on Your Online Identity
Johannes Van Der Merwe	Planning a Pentest: A Data-Driven Approach
Adam Aurisch	Beyond Identity: The Future of Trust, Attestation, and Assurance
Heath Moodie	The Importance of Threat Modelling and How to Get Started
Dr. Gowri Ramachandran & Mr. Atticus D'Mello	Rolling the Risk Dice with GenAI: Early Bets and Emerging Insights

Sponsors

We’re deeply grateful to everyone who supported BSides Brisbane 2025, especially when budgets industry-wide are still tight.

Photos from the day

A few frames from 2025: