Roadsec
loreeventshackingsecurity
Stands for: Roadsec - Latin America's largest hacker festival
Latin America's largest hacker festival - a full-day carnival of talks, CTF, drones, and lockpicks that has toured Brazil's state capitals since 2014.
Roadsec inverted the conference formula: instead of making Brazil's hackers travel to one city, the festival travels to them - a caravan through the state capitals, culminating each year in a mega-edition in São Paulo. The format is deliberately festival, not conference: career talks beside hardware villages, robot-building beside serious research, and at the center the Hackaflag, the CTF championship whose regional rounds along the tour crown a national champion. For a generation of Brazilian students far from the São Paulo-Rio axis, a Roadsec stop was the first time the security community came to their town - which is precisely the point. The organisation behind it is [Flipside](/industry/flipside), which now has an entry on this site's industry timeline.
Roadsec inverted the usual conference economics. Rather than requiring the country's hackers to travel to one city, it travelled to them, running a caravan of editions through state capitals before culminating in a large São Paulo event. In a country of continental scale where a domestic flight can cost more than a monthly wage, that inversion is the whole argument.
The format is deliberately a festival rather than a conference. Career talks sit beside hardware hacking, capture-the-flag competitions, lockpicking and music, which lowers the entry barrier for people who would never have described themselves as belonging at a security event. That mix is a recruitment strategy for the field as much as a programme.
What it demonstrates is that geography is a security problem. Expertise concentrates where events are, events are where money is, and money is in a few cities, so talent outside them stays invisible to an industry that complains about a shortage. Taking the event to the people rather than the reverse is one of the few interventions that addresses the mechanism rather than the symptom.
Both this event and Roadsec are run by the same company, Flipside, and were founded by the same person, Anderson Ramos - a fact neither entry recorded until now, and which explains a great deal about the Brazilian calendar. The two were deliberate opposites: one corporate, expo-heavy and in Sao Paulo; the other a travelling festival taking hacker culture to the state capitals. One organisation ran both ends of the spectrum. Then, in 2024, Roadsec did not happen. The assessment from people close to the scene was not that it failed but that the corporate event had grown so large it consumed the organisation's capacity to run the other one, and Flipside had also wound down the regional editions of both. That is a specific and instructive thing to watch happen: the profitable event did not out-compete the community event in any market, it out-competed it for the attention of the people who ran both. The consequence was not nothing. Local community conferences multiplied into the space the regional editions vacated, which is why the Brazilian calendar now has more small events outside Sao Paulo than it did when a large organiser was serving those cities directly. Whether that is a better outcome depends on what you value, and the honest answer is that it is a different one.
Also known as: roadsec, hackaflag