This past weekend, I had the opportunity to speak at Cackalacky Con in NC about phishing! It was the perfect opportunity to see some friends and practice my public speaking! This little blog post is about my experience.

The Talk: The talk was a 25 minute lightening talk with two LIVE demos! For context, I run most of the phishing engagements at my place of employment so I’ve seen/learned/discovered some things and I wanted to share them with the community. The hardest part was keeping the talk to 25 minutes! Due to the essence of time, I focused on

  • Reverse Proxying
  • Bot Detection
  • SMTP Open Relays
  • Content Filtering Bypasses with HTML

The demos focused on reverse proxying and bot detection. Both demos were live and went off without any issues. Now, if you have ever had to do a live demo, then you’ll know that they don’t normally work live! So this is a really big deal! Unfortunatly the talks were not recorded so there is no link to it. Sorry!

The Con Itself: The con itself was super cool! It’s a small con so it was super easy to see/do most things without the long lines. All the people I met there were local and really nice. It’s nice to be around the gritty, hacker crowd. They are my type of people for sure. I also like they don’t have corporate sponsors; there is too much money in cyber so it is super refreshing to see people getting together just to do cool things instead of getting pitched some vendor tool that is “AI Enhanged”. To be honest, I don’t have anything bad to say! Maybe I’m just being a fan boy, but I really had a good time. Hopefully I’ll be able to go again next year!