For two days at the end of October, the Fredericton Inn on Regent Street will trade its usual hotel-lobby hush for something closer to a hacker summer camp in miniature. BSides Fredericton 2026 runs October 27 and 28, and it is the second edition of a conference that has quickly become the gathering point for the province's information security community.
The format is deliberately unlike a big corporate trade show. BSides is a community-driven framework for building events for and by information security community members, and the Fredericton organizers describe their goal as expanding the conversation beyond the traditional confines of typical conferences, with a particular focus on building and supporting the local community. The result is an intimate, high-intensity couple of days of discussions, demos and interaction, where students, working professionals and curious newcomers are all explicitly welcome.
The name itself carries the history. BSides takes its title from the B-side of a vinyl record, the flip side that never got radio play. The movement began in 2009, when an overwhelming number of presentation submissions to Black Hat USA in Las Vegas meant some talks could not fit the schedule and were turned away. Rather than let those presentations disappear, co-founders Mike Dahn, Jack Daniel and Chris Nickerson helped build an alternative stage for them, and the model was eventually released so that people anywhere could start their own BSides. More than a decade and a half later, BSides chapters operate around the world, from Twin Cities to Philadelphia to Augusta, each shaped by its own local volunteers. Fredericton is listed among them on the global BSides chapter roster.
For the 2026 edition, the first day is the main event. Sign-in and vendor booths open at 8:00 a.m., and speaker sessions run from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. across two tracks, with a vendor area and what the organizers describe as several opportunities to meet up with fellow members of the local information security community in a relaxed setting. The conference day is free to attend, though registration is required.
The speaker list reads like a cross-section of Atlantic Canadian security work with some out-of-town ringers thrown in. Said Izawi of Netskope will talk about securing the frontier of AI and agentic attack surfaces without compromise. Magno Logan of GoHacking and Fellow.ai offers a talk titled "Nobody's Mining Crypto Anymore: What Attackers Actually Want From Your CI." Rahim Pirani of Mariner Innovations presents "Your Newest Employee Isn't Human — And It Has Access." Manuel Charette of Fisheries and Oceans Canada gives a career-focused session called "Career Hack: Design Resilient Growth." Cheryl Biswas of The Diana Initiative presents "Take Off! It's Our Great White North," and she pairs with Jim Troutman of the Northern New England Neutral Internet Exchange and BSides Maine for a talk titled "Do you want to play a game? How about Disabling Civilization?" Julien Richard of Lastwall speaks on "No One Pings Alone: Community as a Service," Vaibhav Yadav of KPMG covers cyber recovery in the age of AI, and David Shipley of Beauceron Security closes out the roster with "The Scamdemic: Why Online Fraud is doing 10X more damage than ransomware."
The second day, October 28, is built for hands-on work. Two workshops run concurrently from 9:00 a.m. to noon, and pre-registration is required. One is "Surviving Machine-Speed Exploitation," a real-time, hands-on session in which participants test-drive the CrowdStrike Falcon platform; attendees need to bring their own laptops. The other, "Minutes to Meltdown," is an interactive cyber incident simulation run with Commvault and KPMG that drops participants into the middle of a fast-moving ransomware-style event, forcing them to grapple with response, escalation, communications, dependencies and recovery. The workshop day is inexpensive rather than free, and participants indicate a preference during registration.
That split structure — a free, open conference day followed by paid, pre-registered workshops — is a common BSides pattern, and it is part of why the model has spread. It keeps the barrier to entry low for students and first-timers while still giving practitioners something to sink their teeth into. The Fredericton organizers lean into that accessibility in their own description: the conference exists to create opportunities for individuals to both present and participate, an approach they say fosters new connections and learning for beginners, experts and everyone in between.
For anyone in the capital region who has wondered what the local security scene actually looks like, the practical details are simple. The Fredericton Inn is at 1315 Regent St., Fredericton, NB, E3C 1A1. The conference day runs October 27; the workshops run the morning of October 28. Registration for the 2026 edition is open through the conference website, which also carries the full schedule and sponsor listing. Sponsorship inquiries go to the organizers by email, and the event maintains a presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and X under the BSides Fredericton name.
It is a modest-sized affair by design — the kind of conference where the person at the registration table is likely to be a volunteer from the local community, and where the hallway conversations are as much the point as the slides. For a province whose security practitioners have historically had to travel to Toronto, Montreal or the United States for this kind of gathering, having one in a hotel ballroom on Regent Street is a change worth noting.