PancakesCon 5

I have a short and sweet one here today. This past weekend was PancakesCon 5, put on by the wonderful Lesley Carhart. I had the opportunity to volunteer for the event, which marks the first time I have worked on a con!

The Con

For those who are unaware, PancakesCon is a 1 day pop-up online con that has a very strange talk format. Each talk is 45 minutes and needs to be 2 topics. The 1st is a primer on a specific security topic, while the second is a totally different topic that is completely unrelated to security. An example from the first PancakesCon would be K6XSS's talk titled "Threat Modeling for Beginners and How to contact the ISS with Ham radio". This is something unique that I love about the con because it shows that we are not, and should not be 100% devoted to security topics all the time.

This year I learned about Email Security and Karate Philosophy, API Security and Household Wiring, MITRE ATT&CK and Muffins, ICS Security and Trashy Reality TV, M365 Account Takeovers and Hiking the Appalachian Hiking Trail, Mosh Pits, Punk, and Security Mindset parallels, Non-Trad Backgrounds and YA Fantasy Writing, and finally Pentesting and Personal Finance. I think next year I may submit a talk, if I can think of something to submit.

The Work

I volunteered this year to help run the con because I think Lesley is kick ass and I wanted to help them. So, I was assigned to be a chat moderator. Frankly, people were pretty well behaved as a whole, and I didn't really have a ton to worry about. I had 2 shorter shifts from about 1100 - 1330, and a second one that was around 1530 - 1900. The break in the middle allowed me to take the dog out and clean the kitchen before coming back to finish up the day. I think the talks were pretty good, and we had relatively few issues on the backend. Audio issues on 1 stream and a 2nd stream died, but both were only 2 minute issues because the AV team kicks ass. Chat moderation was relatively painless, just a little cat herding and I only had to take down 1 post. Even better, the person was totally understanding and respectful about it, which was awesome!

Wrap Up

As mentioned before. I would love to submit a talk for next year and will be brainstorming ideas now. DaveMWilburn said in the Slack post-con "This is easily the most wholesome conference" and frankly. I totally agree. It was fun and I would totally recommend it to anyone with an interest in security, or even some interests outside of security!