Nick Schroeder says it's been years since Peoria's had a proper gathering of information security professionals. Bsides Peoria aims to change that.
The Bsides template was born in 2009, when speakers turned away from an overbooked Las Vegas conference decided to throw their own event. Since then, the community-driven events have cropped up in a number of cities.
Schroeder said the COVID-19 pandemic threw off plans for a 2020 conference, but he's trying again. He's an executive director of the Illinois Cyber Foundation, and an intelligence analyst with Google.
"What we aim to provide is not only to arm people with the knowledge that can help them keep their own businesses secure, but also learn about what the adversaries are doing, what the attackers have been doing the last six months, last year, maybe even what we predict them to do in the future," he said.
The one-day conference Saturday at Bradley University's Business and Engineering Convergence Center features several speakers talking about various aspects of security.
"We're going to talk about cybersecurity and AI, we're going to talk about phishing attacks. We have a couple of presentations on some in-depth research that some professionals have done. So hey, we've researched this product or this specific bug, we found some weaknesses. And we're going to demonstrate how that kind of works," Schroeder said.
He said the event isn't necessarily just for experts, though. Everyone from seniors to young kids, and from CEOs to people just starting their first job are welcome.
