BHack

securityops culture

The technical security conference of Belo Horizonte, and one of the events that made the Brazilian scene something other than a Sao Paulo scene.

Technical rather than corporate, and outside Sao Paulo - one of the regional conferences that exist in inverse proportion to how well the commercial circuit serves the regions.

Technical rather than corporate, in Belo Horizonte rather than Sao Paulo, and both of those facts matter. Brazilian security has a heavy Sao Paulo gravity: the large commercial conferences are there, the vendor ecosystem is there, and for years an engineer in Minas Gerais or Bahia or Rio Grande do Sul either travelled or missed out. BHack is one of the events that pushed against that, alongside NullByte in Salvador, Jampasec in Joao Pessoa and BXSec in Santos - a generation of regional conferences run by local communities on local budgets. Its reputation is specifically for talk quality rather than scale, and the community assessment worth recording is that after some quieter years it recovered the standing of its early editions and went back to being where the region's better practitioners actually turn up. The structural point is not about Brazil. Regional technical conferences exist in inverse proportion to how well the commercial circuit serves the regions, and the clearest illustration is what happened when the largest Brazilian organiser withdrew its regional editions: local community events multiplied into the space. That is worth understanding by anybody who has ever wondered why a scene is thriving in a city with no industry presence. The absence is often the cause.

Also known as: bhack conference, bhack belo horizonte

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