Adventures at Hacker Summer Camp - 2026 Edition

It's time for the annual adventure to Hacker Summer Camp. I'm only able to attend 2 of the 3 parts of Summer Camp (BSides Las Vegas and Black Hat - no DEF CON for me this year), so this will fell a bit incomplete. But I'll make the most of it.

8/4/2026: BSides Las Vegas

BSides Conferences are for the community, full stop. And BSides Las Vegas is one of the best of them. You get representation from all across the spectrum of info/cyber security. Straight up hacker types to CISOs to vendors to analysts. It's a wide umbrella at BSides, and it's a great place to see friends and meet new ones.

I talked to a few sponsors of the event while I was there. First out of the gate: Cognitive Security Institute. I asked Barry Suskind if he would do a quick video about their mission, and he delivered big time. Here are some key points, and then you can watch Barry describe it himself:

• Incident responders and security professionals face rising stress due to increasing incident volume.
• The volume and diversity of information overwhelms the brain.
• They are teaching cybersecurity professionals how to secure and protect their minds.

Next, I talked to Zach Johnston at Checkmarx. I've always known Checkmarx as an application security company, and they still are. But in the "Age of AI", they are pivoting a bit to help secure code created by AI. Here's Zach:

Next is Eric Boivin from Flare. Eric talks quickly about Flare's Cyber threat Intelligence (CTI) platform helps their customers discover exposed data, especially credentials like passwords and other sensitive information.

I'll be adding more from BSides Las Vegas later, plus I'll be adding some details from folks I talked to at Black Hat. Stay tuned!