Volunteer Testimonial blog — The Bsides Rochester 2026 Experience.

Greetings folks,

In this blog I’m covering my experience at Rochester Bsides 2026. Bsides events are conventions for information security and ethical hackers to attend to network and gain noteworthy experience. I’ve previously blogged about my Bsides experience once nearly 5 years ago! This year I took on a different perspective by volunteering. The event historically has its 2nd day convention space at Rochester Institute of Technology Inn and Conference Center on the 3rd week of March. The volunteer count is somewhere around 20–30 volunteers, making it a smaller, more contained and relaxed experience compared to larger infosec conventions. Contrast this with 200 volunteers at events like Bsides seen at more robust cities such as San Francisco.

Community passion projects: Promoting throughout & assisting within.

The hacker-centered event has something for everyone. Activities include training for cybersecurity coaching, talks and presentations from noteworthy individuals, to makerspaces for designing your own hacker badge, to lockpick villages, to companies looking to promote their community building and hiring efforts. It also is attended by many, many enthusiasts of the hobby with a lifelong passion.

My friend who will be named by the handle ‘Stump’ introduced me to my first Bsides in 2018. From there I was exploring much more of our community in hacking. I learned of our makerspace, our local 2600 chapter, and built a handful of convention badges which would eventually lead to me designing my own based off an ESP32 for college & edu purposes. I decided that this year I would help promote the event in virtual and physical space. Here’s my takeaway contributions from the event:

Doing my part to let others “Hack the planet.”

I was thrilled to be a part of something bigger than my own little homelab world & the experience on display was top-notch. I’d like to thank the folks who attended for their experience and guidance on how the event was run. Setup went underway cleanly and despite a bit of delay on arrival. I was brought up to speed and started meeting the other volunteers with enthusiasm. It can be a challenge to handle the meet-and-greet of your colleagues in a single day’s time. I put forth my best effort in doing so, and everyone was quite kind and welcoming in sharing their experience.

Prior to the event I promoted posters with help from the Local Library. Your library is a network to your community and I highly recommend it if you’re in search of any form of media. You’ll be able to meet people who have a vast knowledge of many topics in this space.

Being a smaller event, we had only a handful of questions and tools required to serve. Security detail was run-of-the-mill and conversational when needed over the physical aspect of badging. Information was also shared by answering questions on the event’s discord server. I was able to get up to speed on the HackerTracker app and check event details for those needing to be in-the-know.

Folks would come up to ask for photos and directions; while the event is one continuous hallway, there was ample time to snap group pictures. Funny enough this would be one time I found myself providing my honed freelance photography services for exposure.

Raffle prizes saw a slight upgrade with a contribution of the annual Cisco Snort Calendar. It’s a fun little collectible piece of company ‘con swag’ that one lucky winner got to take home after the event.

The event was a resounding success: the t-shirts sold out quickly and attendees were passing their experience and curiosity to fellow event attendees. The CTF was actively explored. And not as many lockpicks were returned as broken as last year (I hope, can’t exactly confirm the last bit here).

Wrapping up with newfound knowledge and connections:

I hope everyone from sponsors to attendees enjoyed their time at Bsides Rochester 2026. Thanks to the speakers for their time and talks, especially those in the IAM space which I found myself biased towards this year. I’ll be looking at the techniques discussed therein for future research.

Bsides is for everyone! If you’re interested in attending your local event you should check out the Bsides organization directory. You can get more information on next year’s Bsides Rochester 2027 website. Calls for presentation are available in November.

Thanks again to the Bsides Rochester community and every volunteer involved with making this infosec-focused convention happen for another year!

Thank you for reading. Be sure to leave a clap or subscribe if you’d like to see more blogposts like this in the future. 🙂