Beside Myself at BSides OK

I almost didn't go.

BSidesOK 2026. Glenpool, Oklahoma. A two-day cybersecurity event that I'd been circling on the calendar for months. The AI Security Summit on Day 1 was $199. The training days before that were $250 a pop.

I could have just bought a ticket. But that's not how I think.

I looked at the situation and did what any decent hacker does... I devised a plan where everybody wins. I sent a volunteer email. Last minute. No connections. No resume that says CISO on it. Just a guy in cowboy boots with a mohawk who said "hey, I'll work the door if you let me in the room."

They said yes.

I got more face time with speakers, sponsors, and practitioners than most people who paid. They got an extra set of hands. Everybody ate. (Except me.)

The Summit

Day 1 was the AI Security Summit. Smaller crowd. Six talks covering the full spectrum... Microsoft talking Copilot Security. A law firm breaking down AI liability. Red team operators showing how to break LLMs beyond basic prompt injection. An enterprise governance framework. Third-party vendor AI risk assessment. And a talk on vibe engineering with Claude Code that caught my attention for reasons that should be obvious.

This wasn't a side track or a lunch-and-learn bolted onto the main event. BSidesOK gave AI security its own day. Its own ticket. Its own stage. A community conference in Oklahoma running a dedicated AI governance summit alongside Microsoft is the signal. AI governance has graduated from "one talk on the agenda" to its own program.

That matters.

The Conference

Day 2 was BSidesOK proper. Free to the public. Bigger crowd. Three simultaneous tracks running everything from FBI botnet takedowns to pickle deserialization attacks on ML pipelines to why your burned-out sysadmin is your biggest security vulnerability.

More room to move. More hallways to haunt. More conversations that started with "so what do you do?" and ended with someone pulling out their phone to write something down.

Which brings me to the point.

The Naming Argument

Quick sidebar. I got into an argument with another attendee about what to call this thing. I called Day 1 the first conference. He called it a training day. We were both wrong. It was a Summit. The BSidesOK Conference was Day 2.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you actually show up somewhere and talk to people. You argue about dumb stuff. You learn something. You remember the person.

The Handshake

One of the Summit speakers that I intentionally went to hear speak and try to meet with gave a talk on vibe engineering... using Claude Code, MCP integrations, RAG pipelines. Good talk. Real practitioner energy. After the session, during the networking lunch, I walked up, showed him what I'd been building, and introduced him to two new methodologies... CAG and KAG. Cache-Augmented Generation and Knowledge-Augmented Generation.

He'd never heard of either.

We exchanged info and moved about our days.

The Character Play

Here's the thing nobody tells you about networking. Nobody remembers a middle-aged guy with a homelab. Every conference has fifty of those. They blend together like beige cubicle walls.

But everybody remembers the comic book super villain looking guy running around telling people he's basically building an Autobot from junk and using his RV as the frame.

The mohawk isn't costume. The cowboy boots aren't a bit. That's just what I look like on a Thursday. But it's also positioning. When you look like a character, people remember the character. And when the character has substance behind it... when you can back up the look with the work... that's when parallel paths collide.

I spent less than the cost of a nice dinner. I met two people who cover the full spectrum of Oklahoma infosec... one on the academic and research side, one on the enterprise and practitioner side. Both speakers. Both now reading mpdc.dev.

In fact I fully expect a full OSINT report has been or will be done on me by one of them.

The $200 Handshake

Total cost of attendance: $0 in ticket fees. Maybe $5 in gas and a $3 iced tea from QT.

Total return: lots of new friends and contacts, two warm connections who collectively span academic research, enterprise security, and community organizing, and proof that showing up is still the most underrated strategy in tech.

Show up. Be useful. Be memorable. Be yourself. Don't be an ASS.

The hallway track is where parallel paths collide.

Next up: The RV points east. HackNWA 2026: Holiday in Scambodia. Bentonville, Arkansas. April 17th. Two tracks, a hardware hacking village, a Panel of PWN, and a conference theme about AI-weaponized scam operations that hits close to everything we talk about here.

If you see the mohawk... come say hi. The hallway track is open.