Another Challenge Unlocked

Want to 10-15 minute talk?

    Some people challenge themselves by taking major risks, like skydiving or something, but for me I'm far more content with findings things I'm already uncomfortable with and trying to be okay with it. I'm not the kind of person who just jumps at everything, so much I've been questioned for agoraphobia from a psychologist at one point. So, when me and the misses went up to the Dallas Hackers Association for the first time, we found that there was only a few people wanting to do talks. So when they asked if I wanted to, obviously.... I panicked and figured there's no way. So after my wife talked me into it, I wrote up a little talk for the next month's meeting.

No but lets do it anyway!

    At first I spent about 2 weeks having absolutely 0 idea what to talk about. The core worry is that I didn't have something worth talking about. Just normal day to day stuff everyone knows about and really makes no difference to talk about. So I made a very simple slideshow ( linked here for google slides ), where I talked about several of the blog posts I've made and the stories behind them. Nothing really special, but it's something!

    The idea was simple, go up there, read some things off each slide, hope that someone pays enough attention to see the silly little things added as jokes on each page, aaand hope to not make a fool of myself. But to write that down, I had to go back over the things I'd previously done and see what I can talk about. 

Here's the ones that made the cut:

  • https://blog.feemcotech.solutions/2025/10/yara-hunting-phishing-samples.html

  • https://blog.feemcotech.solutions/2025/06/isp-routing-hell.html

  • https://blog.feemcotech.solutions/2026/05/spooky-wifi.html

    These are pretty simple to relate to each other. The yara rules page discussed finding these phishing kits on insecure cloud storage. These were searched by the provider level, and providers helped gain that access. In the isp routing hell, again a provider had a problem that could have led to a number of other issues. Finally same for the spooky wifi one, the provider made a mistake that could have led to serious cyber attacks based on the configuration. Unifying theme to me is just finding things that service providers keep messing up on. 

Giving the talk

    Would you believe, it was embarrassing, stressful, and I missed 90% of what I wanted to say. First and foremost, apparently you have to be online to view slideshow on google slides. So there was a lot of trying to connect just so I could play it, and one dude wound up turning on his phone's hot spot and telling me to connect to it, that worked but not before having to sit down and wait for another talk to be given. All very embarrassing. Then finally got to go through it and I no longer was ready to read the page and review what to talk about, I just sort of went off my own memory based on topics.

    I tried to tell myself to remember to interact with the audience a bit which wound up taking more time than anything else. I think it turned out okay because of this actually. I wound up discussing the 172. range a bit more, made the point that the only 3 people in the crowd who actively monitor their provider's routes, tend to be network engineers, things like this. 

Lessons Learned

    So things I learned from this, mostly consists of how awkward things will always be awkward. There's no getting around it, only through it. I also realized that having something that you feel people will be impressed with, isn't going to be as important as getting anything out there. Immediately after this I've gotten several discussions started and that was largely the goal anyway. I even wrote some contact info down for someone, but i never got contacted on those. Many people seem to have two policies of going towards these talks, based on the two times I've been up there. Some seem extremely excited to talk about the latest thing they did and are excited to get feedback for it. The other side is people seem to treat it like an academic report, where they're discussing something for the goal of their learning or teaching others. For my sake, I was just trying to push myself to do something I'd never done, so I feel like I didn't really fit in well for this. I could go on and on in my head about how the guy in the back had his head turned and the guy on the side listening seemed to lose interest pretty quick once I started talking, and all these sort of things; but at the end of the day I guess their interactions like that didn't really make a difference to me as much as the guy who actually discussed the stuff with me, and the other guy with him who went on a mini rant about how conspiracy theories in IT are often very very real.

    Those made the difference for me and I hope to one day say thanks for that to them. 

Thanks for reading

If you need any IT or CyberSecurity work remotely or within the DFW area, please contact us over at FeemcoTechnologies.

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