Closing Ceremony

The closing ceremony of BSides Las Vegas 2024 opens with organizers reviewing the year. They report roughly 490 talk proposals, about 200 talks and trainings across ten tracks, and new formats such as facilitated discussion groups. Feedback on the keynotes was positive, and the organizers welcomed a new partnership with Sky Talks. They also noted scheduling lessons for next year, including not booking a keynote speaker straight into another session.

The middle of the ceremony is devoted to contests. The instructor of a cloud forensics training describes the mini capture-the-flag run during the course and hands out challenge coins and a learning subscription to the top individual and team finishers. The organizer of an offensive and defensive exercise then explains its format: a red team with weeks of advance access to a simulated enterprise network, including Active Directory and web servers, faces blue teams that spend days preparing to detect and hunt. The exercise ends with a scorched-earth phase and a hot wash in which the red team explains its techniques and the defenders' options. The winning team is announced, and the staff and players are thanked.

The final segment covers a charity auction that raised just over $10,000 for two supported charities, with the organizers announcing that BSides would round the total up. Unsold items went into a lucky-loser raffle. The organizers close by asking attendees to raise their hands if they met someone new, learned something, or plan to act on something they picked up at the event, and they send the audience off to return next year.