Final Pre-Conference Notes for 2025

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PancakesCon is this coming Sunday, the 21st of September (running into the 22nd for some of us!). It will start at 6AM Central US Time (Chicago), for a very good reason. No, I have not become a morning person. We are partnered with ComfyCon Australia – a peer digital conference, this year. The objective is to cover every global time zone with great and totally free virtual cybersecurity education content. Both of our conferences will be streaming one another, and we might even have some fun surprises in the intros and outros with shared fun.

Our schedule and streams will be found here: 2025 Conference Information. The most important thing you can do is join our Slack, linked in the menu above!

Here’s some great information on ComfyCon from their organizers:

The ComfyCon Stream will be here: https://www.youtube.com/live/P4Shsxwe5C0 (Also cross-streamed to PancakesCon). No registration, no accounts, just join on YouTube. Starting at 1200 AEDT (Canberra Time)
Chat is here (we use discord): https://discord.com/invite/YAR9jKHPXB
Come along, say hello.

Both of our conferences have great talks lined up, villages, competitions, give-aways, prizes, and a lot of community fun. Make sure to register for the chats and get involved!

Thanks to our 2025 Sponsors

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We could not operate PancakesCon without the support of some amazing teams who donate time and prizes to make the conference a success: the SANS Institute, Lockpick Extreme. Qualcomm, Cyphercon Milwaukee, Semperis, and Comans Services. Their sites are linked below and I really encourage you to check them out. Some of them have supported us for multiple years and they are really taking a chance on making a tiny, informal community event successful.

Finally, thank you to our many anonymous community volunteers, donors, and participants who make this conference a success every year.

Introducing our 2025 Keynotes!

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Yes! Keynotes! Plural. We are growing up as a conference.

Our conference will be opened by the imitable Bruce Large in Australia, who will act as a terrific bridge between ComfyCon and PancakesCon. PancakesCon will be closed by the terrific Alyssa Miller. If you aren’t familiar with these two absolute legends, here are their bios:

Bruce Large

Bruce has over 15 years experience working with IT and Operational Technology in network, telecommunications and system engineering roles. Bruce has worked in Electricity Generation & Transmission, Railway, Aviation, Emergency Services and Consulting industries. Bruce is the Founder and Principal Cyber Security Architect at BLARGE.

He is a Chartered Professional Engineer (CPEng), Registered Professional Engineer of Queensland (RPEQ), Foundation Chartered SABSA Architect (SCF), holds the Global Industrial Cyber Security Professional (GICSP), GIAC Response and Industrial Defense (GRID) certificate, GIAC Security Operations Manager (GSOM), GIAC Cyber Threat Intelligence (GCTI), an ISA/IEC 62443 Expert, and has attended Industrial Control Systems (ICS) Cyber Security training at QUT.

Bruce graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (Telecommunications) First Class Honours and a Master of Business (Applied Finance) with Distinction from QUT.

Alyssa Miller

Alyssa Miller is a hacker who, in her pre-teens, bought her first computer and hacked her way into a paid dial-up community platform. She grew up in hacker culture, finding her hacker family in IRC channels during her adolescent years. While IT was not her original career plan, she ended up working as a developer and later a penetration tester in the financial services industry. As she moved into consulting, her focus on defending technology systems and personal privacy grew to the point where she was advising fortune 100 companies on how to build comprehensive security programs.

Alyssa is now the CISO at New York based Epiq Global. Still very much a hacker to this day, she’s built on that identity to grow her career. She is an internationally recognized public speaker and author of “Cybersecurity Career Guide”. She’s an advocate for helping others make a career out of their passion for hacking and security in general. She’s also a proponent for the open sharing of ideas and perspectives on improving our technologically connected world.

We’re Partnering with ComfyCon!!!!!!!~

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That’s the post. This year we will be partnering with ComfyCon Australia to offer a full 18 – eighteen hours of virtual infosec pajama fun, covering pretty much all of planet Earth. We will be working jointly on CFP, keynotes, and volunteer rosters. We will be simulcasting one another. Details to follow.

CFP has opened to con returning guests, and will open publicly soon (as per the previous post). Call for volunteers is open. We are utterly thrilled for this epic collab.

Important Dates for PancakesCon 2025!

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Hello friends, and thanks for your patience!

We are pleased to announce PancakesCon 6: Family Brunch will occur on September 21, 2025, from 6AM – 3PM US Central Time (Chicago) / 9:00 PM – 6:00 AM Sept 22 Australian Eastern Time (Melbourne) ! Here are some important dates to remember:

Call for Volunteers – Open: https://forms.gle/VF5vzEkq8DomRuZv5
Call for Volunteers Closes: 28 August, 2025

Call for Papers – Open: https://forms.gle/K8UnDGHPdmj6vTgZ8
Call for Papers Closes: 9 August, 2025
Call for Papers Results Provided By: 23 August, 2025

Call for Sponsors Open: Contact hacks4pancakes (at) gmail.com – we look for prize donations (virtual or shipped) for competition and raffle winners, and will show your branding routinely throughout the con and on our website. A great way to get name recognition via some small swag or services.

Links to all the above will be posted on our social channels and Slack!

Introducing our 2024 Keynote: Deviant Ollam!

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Every year I am so honored and humbled by the amazing speakers who agree to keynote PancakesCon purely out of the goodness of their hearts and their care for the community. I hope you tune in this year to see the absolutely incredible-fantastic Deviant Ollam opening our con with, “Getting the Right Rotation: Safe Locks and Sushi Rolls”! Deviant is a fixture in the hacking community, especially the fascinating niche of breaking into (and out of) buildings, and lots of other physical stuff that is supposed to be secure.

In his own words:
“While paying the bills as a physical penetration specialist with
The CORE Group and the Director of Education for Red Team Alliance,
Deviant Ollam also sat on the Board of Directors of the US division of
TOOOL — The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers — for 14 years… acting
as the the nonprofit’s longest-serving Boardmember. His books Practical
Lock Picking and Keys to the Kingdom are among Syngress Publishing’s
best-selling pen testing titles. In addition to being a lockpicker,
Deviant is also a SAVTA certified safe technician, a GSA certified safe
and vault inspector, member of the International Association of
Investigative Locksmiths, a Life Safety and ADA Consultant, and an NFPA
Fire Door Inspector. At multiple annual security conferences Deviant
started Lockpick Village workshop areas, and he has conducted physical
security training sessions for Black Hat, the SANS Institute, DeepSec,
ToorCon, HackCon, ShakaCon, HackInTheBox, ekoparty, AusCERT, GovCERT,
CONFidence, the FBI, the NSA, DARPA, the National Defense University,
the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, and the United States
Military Academy at West Point. In his limited spare time, Deviant
enjoys loud moments with lead acceleration and quiet times with
podcasts. He arrives at airports too early and shows up at parties too.”