It has been a while since my last blog-post and the main reason for that, was the numerous things I had to keep track for organising:
It has been a very busy year trying to organise this Security BSides event for the first time in Athens, Greece, with plenty of “hiccups” to overcome in the meantime.
Once we had a team of people who were equally excited and passionate about this, we started working towards the event details.
Given the opportunity, I would like to personally thank the team once again, all the volunteers who helped out on the day, the review committee who provided constructive feedback to all submissions, the speakers who travelled from all over the world to be there and present, and last but not least, all of YOU who attended the event.
Special thanks goes to our sponsors, who trusted us on our promise to deliver this information security community based conference. We couldn't be able to bring this event to Athens, especially for the first time if it wasn’t for them, and for that we really appreciate their contribution and support.
Of course, such an event would not be able to exist without the community support we had from fellow conferences all over Europe, the Universities that promoted the conference, the Hellenic Army General Staff, and all the people how were involved and made this event a success story.
We had some great feedback already and we are committed to tweak things according to the recommendations and suggestions we received in order to make the event next year even better. There is always room for improvement and for more people to get involved.
We had two important announcements on the day. The first was made by the keynote speaker Colonel Myron Koutsias, who announced that KEPYES is opening a direct channel of communication with Greek students and InfoSec professional who need to do their military service. More specifically, it was announced that KEPYES will be accepting and reviewing CVs from individual who have InfoSec related studies and/or work experience in order to allocate them to the appropriate department during their military service. Effectively, allowing these people to get work experience during their military service, and also giving them the opportunity to do something interesting and in some cases extraordinary, during that time.
The second announcement was about the initiative and support by Security BSides Athens in putting together a national team to compete in Enisa’s European Cyber Security Challenge. The purpose is to identify talents that will be able to represent the country in the forthcoming European competition. You will find more information on this on the dedicated website ecsc.gr and see who is eligible to enter. Consider sponsoring the national team and have your name among the proud sponsors. Currently, the national team is sponsored by TwelveSec and the University of Piraeus.
During the event, we had three tracks. Two of the tracks had talks, and the third one was scheduled to have workshops. We had speakers from all over the world and we are very thankful that they decided to come at the first Security BSides Athens conference.
We are already looking forward to the next year’s event, and we have some really cool ideas on how to make it even better.
Please make sure you contact us as soon as possible, if you would like to be a sponsor, a community supporter, a volunteer or you simply have a cool idea that you would like to see it becoming a reality. This year, we had an interesting Treasure Hunt game, that people participated, enjoyed and won prizes.
We asked all speakers to create a short blog post about their talk and we will upload it along with the recording of their talk to peerlyst in the next couple of weeks.
Once again, thank you all for making the first ever Security BSides Athens such a great success and we hope to see you all next year.
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