Campfire Talks

This is a virtual campfire night of short personal stories recorded at BSides Las Vegas in 2021. A panel of judges asks each storyteller follow-up questions before the next person steps up.

Duncan Sparrow opens with a 1990 cyber operation linked to Operation Desert Shield, covering undercover roles and a plan to interfere with Iraqi air defense communications that arrived too late. Another storyteller describes a months-long intrusion into a network appliance vendor, where attackers reached a PAM module and took source code and signing material, and argues that single sign-on without extra verification was a weak point. Alice Hardy recounts a junior analyst struggling with PowerShell on a server and getting flagged, a lesson about supervision. Ian Meyer tells of slipping into a theme park's service tunnels as a teenager.

Later tales cover a managed provider whose logs and backups vanished after its contract was cancelled, an intern's looped cable that took retail sites offline, and a river that froze enough to walk across during an assessment. The night closes with BSides Las Vegas origin history, and Ian Meyer is named the winner. Practical takeaways include keeping logging on, storing backups off-site, adding checks beyond single sign-on, and planning carefully before cutting a vendor's access.