I go up t’North to talk about Removing Damn Vulnerable Code, DJ for Cyber House Party and experience the beauty that is butter pie! We don’t do owt by halves!

I always thought my first BSides would be London and I thought I would have definitely got to one before 2023!! As it was, BSides Lancashire on March 30th 2023 would actually be my first!
AND WHAT AN EVENT IT WAS!

A fantastic road trip with Nikki Webb and Andy James was a Haribo fun filled adventure in itself where all us were, well as punctual as you’d expect us to be if you know us (to be fair Andy is very punctual)! This followed by a very boozy PreSides in the evening was a great way to start!

The day itself was packed with many fantastic talks over three rooms. I gotta admit I stayed where I was speaking in Innovation Village for the most part and two talks that I learned a lot from were James Bore’s talk on Information Theory and Sean Wright’s on how to create good AppSec on a Shoestring budget.

Removing Damn Vulnerable Code

My talk was Removing Damn Vulnerable Code. It’s a play on words on various OWASP projects known as “Damn Vulnerable” projects. Essentially they’re projects that are intentionally vulnerable that you can learn to fix up and therefore learn how to code securely. There are various ones, from the original Damn Vulnerable Web App written in PHP that I used to practice with about 10 years ago, to the Java based OWASP Webgoat and many others.

The other part of the talk was looking at potential exploits that could be found in code…… but through the medium of memes!

I hope it was as fun to watch as it was to create! Here it is:

We then partied hard in the evening for a vinyl special Cyber House Party where I was joined by Mr CHP Marc Avery himself and the exquisitely amazing Sam Humphries from Exabeam. I had loads of fun as always and we raised some great funds for the NSPCC.