Conference Launch and Keynote
Huxley Barbee, Shweta Jain, John Hammond
BSides NYC 2025 (0x05) · Day 1 · Keynote
John Hammond's keynote at BSides NYC 2024, titled "The Good, Bad, and Ugly: An Origin Story," offers a deeply personal and unusually candid look into the non-linear path to a successful career in cybersecurity. Far from a typical technical deep dive, Hammond, a prominent cybersecurity researcher, educator, and content creator at Huntress, shares his journey from an aspiring "hacker" to a respected industry figure, detailing the unexpected detours, significant failures, and pivotal moments that shaped his professional life. This talk serves as a powerful reminder that the road to success is rarely straight and often paved with invaluable lessons learned from mistakes.
AI review
Hammond's BSides NYC keynote is a well-delivered personal narrative — candid, humanizing, and genuinely useful for an audience that skews toward early-career practitioners. It's not research, it's not strategy, it's a war story about failure and reinvention, and judged on those terms it does its job cleanly.