Hurricane Helene wiped it out last year, but BSides Augusta is back on track for October and should secure a strong punch to the CSRA economy.
Figures provided by Destination Augusta show the impact BSides has on the local economy. In 2023, the conference pumped more than $500,000 into the local economy.
The cancellation in 2024 meant a loss of just over $555,000. Early predictions for this year say the event will mean more than $522,000, with final figures tallied after the conference.
BSides is a cybersecurity conference for practitioners and information security professionals. Its roots are in the DEF CON and Black Hat conferences that began in Las Vegas.
“BSides Augusta is one of the over 100 that take place worldwide annually,” Phil Plantamura, COO of Security Onion Solutions, LLC, explained for ABD. “BSides Augusta, started in 2013, bringing the community of information security professionals together to have conversations about technical topics.”
The conference was one of the first major events to fall victim to Hurricane Helene. The storm hit 48 hours before the 2024 conference was set to begin.
“We had planned everything up to the gnat’s toenail by that time, and we were ready to go,” said Plantamura. “We still have boxes of giveaways, and we still have speaker coordination, all these trainings that were happening, and so now we’re ready to do it again this year.”
“We know that Augusta is a convention city,” Bennish Brown, President/CEO of Destination Augusta, said. “Quite often, it is invisible to people until we go out for our lunchtime, then our restaurants are packed. BSides will keep that kind of atmosphere going for us. We’re a city of entrepreneurs, and Bsides just lives that brand for us as well.”
This year also marks a new location for Bsides. All events will be in the Georgia Cyber Innovation and Technology Center. The keynote speaker will be Dr. Johannes Ullrich, Dean of Research for SANS Technology Institute. He is also the founder of the Internet Storm Center (DShield.org), which provides a free analysis and warning service to thousands of Internet users and organizations.
Speakers will include Andrew Gomez, currently an Adversary Simulations Consultant at SpecterOps; Anna Bertiger, an ML researcher at Sublime Security working on email security; and Sharon Martin, co-founder and CEO of Managed Nerds and an ABD contributor.
Martin said she will explain click fraud and advertising fraud, something she discovered while collaborating with clients.
“They were getting clicks, but it wasn’t leading to calls, and when I dug into the metadata more, I realized these were actually bots doing the clicks, and they weren’t real humans,” she said. “Those free apps you get on your phone, if your phone is getting hot because you’re using them, it’s because, in the background, it’s submitting fake ad clicks to different sites and using your information to fill out contact forms on these websites. It’s especially rampant with display ads.”
Bsides kicks off on Monday, Oct. 20, and activities run through Saturday, Oct. 25. Registration is underway at the BSides website and includes special rates at sponsor hotels Hyatt House Augusta, 1268 Broad St.; Crowne Plaza, 1060 Center Street, North Augusta; Augusta Marriott at the Convention Center, 2 Tenth Street and Sheraton Augusta Hotel, 1069 Stevens Creek Rd.
For more information and to register, go to: https://bsidesaugusta.org/
