Firetalks

Firetalks is the short-talk contest held during ShmooCon 2025. Each speaker gets roughly fifteen minutes, a panel of judges scores the talks with playful rubrics, and the audience contributes donations and light-hearted bribes. The host traces the event back to 2009, notes that this is its last run at ShmooCon, and thanks past judges, volunteers and speakers who kept it going.

The lineup ranges widely. One speaker links the old hobo code to the security community's habit of helping peers find work and resist burnout. Another offers a career framework that treats a job search like reconnaissance against a target. A SOC analyst describes using memes, fake passwords and decoy files to stress-test alerts and wake up tired teams. A statistics talk argues that distributions communicate uncertainty better than single averages in security reports. A malware researcher introduces an open-source database that stores samples and finds similar files with fuzzy hashes. The final talk shows how a small local language model can solve the ticket site's text captcha, and how a route announcement could redirect traffic to the registration server, along with defenses such as per-user URLs.

For practitioners, the session is a reminder that short, focused talks can carry useful ideas. The detection testing, the uncertainty-aware reporting and the community-building advice are easy to adapt, while the ticketing demo doubles as a case study in weak rate limiting and cleartext traffic.