Friday, September 25, 2026
8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Victoria Conference Centre, 720 Douglas Street, Victoria, BC (open in Google Maps)
$27.96–$86.53
Unavailable
Organizer(s): BSides Vancouver Island
Sponsor(s): Horizon3.ai, Solution Stack, Snyk, BCGEU, WebSec, Zafran, SailPoint, Varonis, Cycode, Zenity
Vancouver Island's community-driven security conference, and by the organiser's own count its fifth edition since 2019. The published programme runs two tracks at the Victoria Conference Centre: twelve talks plus a vendor session, closing remarks, and an afterparty at Milestones on the harbour level. Subjects range from threat hunting in Google's DMCA data and attackers taking over network edge control planes, to the Shai-Hulud supply chain worm, agentic AI on both the attacking and the defending side, tracking evasive VPN clients, and the residential proxy economy running through home televisions. BSides itself began in 2009 as a home for speakers a larger conference had no room for, and the events stay volunteer-organised and corporate-funded. Open to security professionals, enthusiasts, and the security-curious at every level, with a 40 percent Helijet partner rate for anyone flying in from the mainland.
Anu's Take
The agenda landed, and five of the twelve talks are about AI or agentic systems, mostly as the attacker rather than the tool. One is a deep dive on Shai-Hulud, the first self-replicating worm npm has actually had, which hit hundreds of packages and, in its later form, wipes the home directory if it cannot find anywhere left to spread. That is the advantage of a volunteer programme over a vendor one: it tracks what happened this year instead of what sells.
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Published Saturday, July 11, 2026 by Anu Jolliffe on LinkedIn