With temperatures dropping, the holidays approaching, and everyone hopefully catching their breath after “Black October” and an endless cycle of aggressive bug patching, it is time to hit pause on the slides, terminals, and emergency hotfixes.
This month, we are skipping the formal presentation and heading out for a casual RISE community social!
Whether you need to decompress after patching systems, debrief on your latest homelab experiments, talk shop, or just unwind with friendly local faces, we would love to see you there.
The Details
Event: RISE Fall Social Night
Date: Thursday, November 12th
Time: 6:00 PM
Location: Starr Hill Roanoke Pilot Brewery & Side Stage (6 Old Whitmore Ave, Roanoke, VA 24016)
What to Expect
Zero Slides, 100% Casual: No agenda, no formal talks, and no stress. Just a relaxed evening to chat, network, and hang out.
Open to Everyone: Whether you are an industry veteran, an aspiring student, a hobbyist, or brand new to the RISE community, everyone is welcome.
Food & Drinks: Starr Hill has plenty of craft beer, cider, and non-alcoholic beverage options.
Come out, bring a friend or colleague, and enjoy a relaxed evening with the Roanoke tech and infosec community.
See you Thursday, November 12th at 6:00 PM at Starr Hill!
October is officially here! With crisp fall air, leaves turning, and cybersecurity awareness month in full swing, it is the perfect time to level up your infrastructure and build something cool.
This month, we are diving deep into homelab architecture, automation, and modern orchestrators. Whether you are running a single mini-PC under your desk or a full server rack in the basement, this session will show you how to modernize your setup with enterprise-grade tooling.
The Details
Speaker: Aaron McPhall
Topic: The Modern Homelab: Scaling to Kubernetes Orchestration
Date: Thursday, October 8th
Time: 6:00 PM
Location: Virginia Western Community College (VWCC)
About the Talk
The Modern Homelab: Scaling to Kubernetes Orchestration
Whether you are running a single multi-purpose computer, managing multiple machines, or experimenting with hypervisors and containers, you can evolve your setup into a modern, production-grade platform. In this presentation, you will discover how to transition across every stage of the homelab maturity model by deploying a secure Kubernetes cluster built on modest, budget-friendly hardware using repurposed PCs.
Aaron will share how to build an immutable operating system foundation with Talos Linux and streamline system management through automated GitOps workflows using Gitea and ArgoCD. The session details real-world mitigations for infrastructure and security challenges, including strategies for handling resource constraints, automating update cycles, and safely executing workflows with robust telemetry and controls. Regardless of where you currently stand in your homelab journey, you will gain practical architecture patterns and actionable inspiration to take your infrastructure to the next level.
Meeting Details:
We will be meeting at Virginia Western Community College in the Hall Family Business/Science Building. Take the stairs to the left and go to the third floor and go to the CyberSecurity lab in room M302.
Upcoming Event: Defense Against the Dark Arts (Oct 29th)
Don’t forget to mark your calendars for another major event happening later this month! Defense Against the Dark Arts takes place on October 29th at VWCC.
This panel and live-demo event brings together local practitioners to break down modern cyber attack techniques and practical defenses for enterprise systems.
Event Details: Check out the full event overview on the RBTC Event Page.
Call for Presentations (CFP): Want to present or showcase a demo? The CFP is open! Submit your proposal here.
Bring a friend, grab a seat, and join us for an evening of homelab talk and community networking.
Mark your calendars for Thursday, October 8th at 6:00 PM at VWCC. See you all there!
As September rolls in, the days are getting a little shorter, the weather is starting to cool down, and school is back in session. With fall right around the corner, we are mixing things up for our September meetup with a format built entirely around you!
This month, we are bringing back a format from the RISE vault (dating back to our early days in 2017): a community Open Mic & Lightning Talk Night!
The Pitch: Open Mic Night
Do you have a cool side project you want to show off? A weird bug you recently ran into? A story from the trenches, or a question you want the local community to help answer? You don’t need a 45-minute slide deck or weeks of preparation to take the stage.
We are opening up the floor for quick, 5-minute spiels, show-and-tells, questions, and open discussion. It is a casual way to share what you’re working on or learning. And as the audience, if someone brings up a topic you want to hear more about, you might just convince the speaker to come back to RISE for a deeper dive. If you just want to sit and listen, that’s cool too!
Oh, and we will have pizza again! 🍕
Meeting Details:
We will be meeting at Virginia Western Community College in the Hall Family Business/Science Building. Take the stairs to the left and go to the third floor and go to the CyberSecurity lab in room M302.
Upcoming News: Defense Against the Dark Arts (Oct 29th)
Mark your calendars for another big local event coming up this fall! Defense Against the Dark Arts is happening on October 29th at VWCC.
This will be a panel and demo event designed to showcase some of the most cutting-edge cyber attacks today, along with practical strategies for protecting your systems and infrastructure.
Event Details: You can check out full event details on the RBTC Event Page.
Call for Presentations (CFP): Interested in presenting a topic or running a live demo? The CFP is officially open! Submit your proposal here.
Whether you want to take the mic for 5 minutes or just hang out and listen to what others in the community are building, we’d love to have you out.
Mark your calendars for September 10th at 6:00 PM at VWCC. See you all there!
As August rolls in and Hacker Summer Camp wraps up, we’re continuing the excitement right here at home with ‘Noke’s own hacker summer event!
This month, we are thrilled to welcome a very familiar face to the podium, one of RISE’s own co-founders, Robert Garbee! Whether you’re looking to build a security program from scratch, mature an existing one, or learn how to speak the language of business leadership, this is a session you won’t want to miss.
The Details
Speaker: Robert Garbee (Director of Information Security at Carilion Clinic & RISE Co-Founder)
Topic: You Can’t Buy a Security Program: A Business-First Roadmap for Building Security from the Ground Up
Date: Thursday, August 13th
Time: 6:00 PM (Financials update at 5:50 PM)
Location: Virginia Western Community College (VWCC)
Food:We will be providing free pizza! 🍕
Important Note: We will be sharing our quarterly financial update starting at 5:50 PM, 10 minutes prior to the main presentation. Be sure to arrive a few minutes early if you’d like to catch the update!
About the Speaker
Robert Garbee is the Director of Information Security at Carilion Clinic, bringing over 25 years of experience across healthcare, education, and defense sectors. A co-founder of both RISE and BSides Roanoke, as well as an adjunct instructor at Virginia Western Community College, Robert is a longtime leader and familiar voice in our regional cybersecurity community.
About the Talk
You Can’t Buy a Security Program: A Business-First Roadmap for Building Security from the Ground Up
Building an effective information security program takes more than purchasing tools and checking compliance boxes. This presentation provides a practical roadmap for starting from scratch, or bringing structure to an immature program, by securing executive sponsorship, understanding the business, assessing the environment against the CIS Critical Security Controls, prioritizing risk, and building sustainable governance, funding, and teams. Attendees will leave with an actionable approach for translating technical concerns into business risk and developing a security program that can mature with the organization.
Whether you’re a practitioner, a leader, a student, or just interested in security strategy, come out and support one of RISE’s founders!
Meeting Details:
We will be meeting at Virginia Western Community College in the Hall Family Business/Science Building. Take the stairs to the left and go to the third floor and go to the CyberSecurity lab in room M302.
We hope you’re surviving the July heat! Whether you’ve been spending your summer flipping hotdogs on the grill or flipping bits in the terminal, we’ve got the perfect excuse for you to escape the humidity and step into some glorious air conditioning.
We are keeping the summer sizzle going this month with an incredible speaker and a topic focused on taking back your privacy and liberating your own hardware.
The Details
Speaker: Mark Carman
Topic: Removing Alexa: Hacking Amazon Echo devices for Local Voice Control
Date: Thursday, July 9th
Time: 6:00 PM
Location: Virginia Western Community College, Business/Science Building, Room M302 (see details below)
The Perks:We are providing pizza! 🍕
About the Talk
Amazon makes some really good smart devices, but they come with the privacy issue of handing all of your personal information and more directly to a mega corporation. Instead of succumbing to the corporate surveillance state, lets take ownership of our hardware and keep our data to ourselves.
Mark will show which Amazon Echo devices are hackable, how the hack works, perform a live hack to show how easy it is, and turn echo devices into a fully locally controlled voice assistant that can control your home without an internet connection!
Whether you are a privacy advocate, an IoT hobbyist, or just want to watch some great live hacking, this is a demonstration you won’t want to miss.
Where
We will be meeting at Virginia Western Community College in the Hall Family Business/Science Building. Take the stairs to the left and go to the third floor and go to the CyberSecurity lab in room M302.
Mark your calendars, bring a friend, and we look forward to seeing you all back at Virginia Western on July 9th!
BSides Roanoke 2026 is officially in the books, and what an absolute blast it was!
Thank you so much to everyone who spoke, volunteered, sponsored, or just came out to hang and learn. You are the reason this community is so special, and you made the return of BSides unforgettable.
Now that the stage is packed up and the summer weather is officially heating up, it is time to wind down. Let’s celebrate with some frosty beverages.
Join us this Thursday, June 11th at 6:00 PM for a casual post-BSides social at Starr Hill. There’s no agenda and no presentations; just a great chance to hang out, swap stories, and catch up with the local infosec scene.
🍻 The Essentials
Date: Thursday, June 11th
Time: 6:00 PM
Location: Starr Hill Pilot Brewery & Side Stage (Roanoke, VA)
Vibe: 100% Social. Cold drinks, warm weather, and post-con chat.
The organizers have been hard at work behind the scenes getting BSides Roanoke 2026 ready for its big return after our non-profit hiatus. We are incredibly excited, a little exhausted, and honestly? We’re ready for a frosty beverage with the community.
Join us on May 14th at 6:00 PM for a casual social at Starr Hill Pilot Brewery & Side Stage. There’s no agenda and no formal presentations; just a great opportunity for the local infosec scene to hang out, swap stories, and catch up on everything we’ve been building for 2026.
Vibe: 100% Social. Networking, shop talk, and BSides hype.
📢 BSides Roanoke 2026: Important Update
Last Call for Guaranteed Shirts: This is the final week to purchase a ticket and be guaranteed a conference shirt in your specific size. Don’t miss out on the official “Return of BSides” threads; head over to the site and grab your ticket now to make sure we have one waiting for you!
We’ve missed this event during our “re-org” year and can’t wait to see everyone in person again. See you at Starr Hill!
P.S.Want a secret sneak peek? If you poke aroundbsidesroa.org right now, you might just find some of the upcoming talks starting to show up. Don’t tell anyone we told you…
As the spring rains settle over the Roanoke Valley, there is something about the atmosphere of a rainy April evening that pairs perfectly with a deep-dive technical session behind the glow of a screen. We’re heading back into the lab this month to take shelter from the showers and focus on the latest in kernel security.
April 9 @ 6:00 PM: Main Meeting: Tyler “dru1d” Booth presents “Make No Mistake: Kernel Hacking with AI.”
June 5: BSides Roanoke 2026 – Tickets are moving fast.
Final Call: The BSides CFP is reaching its deadline—submit your proposals now.
Special Announcement: RISE Financials
Time: 5:45 PM (15 minutes before the main event)
Now that RISE is officially a non-profit, we want to be transparent with the community that keeps us running. We will be presenting the RISE financials briefly before our guest speaker begins.
Arrive early to dodge the showers and see how we’re bootstrapping the future of RISE.
RISE Meeting: Make No Mistake: Kernel Hacking with AI
Time: 6:00 PM
This month, we are excited to welcome Tyler “dru1d” Booth, who will show us how modern AI can be used to navigate the complex world of kernel driver reverse engineering.
About the Talk
Kernel driver reverse engineering has always been a slow, painful grind. Weeks of decompilation, IOCTL tracing, and hunting for known exploit primitives. But what if you could compress months of work into days with AI models doing the heavy lifting?
Tyler will walk through building an AI-assisted kernel exploitation workflow, from purpose-built agent pipelines to the pragmatic reality of manually steering Claude through driver triage and weaponization.
In this session, we’ll cover:
HEXXUS: A platform of specialized AI agents (triager, exploit dev, crash handler, orchestrator) backed by custom MCP servers for WinDbg, Hyper-V, and Binary Ninja. What happens when you try to fully automate driver exploitation, and how much it can run up your API bill.
CASE STUDY: INFOHAZARD BOF: Four days from VirusTotal target identification to a fully weaponized Beacon Object File: kernel virtual memory read/write, token manipulation, credential dumping, process integrity modification, and kernel callback enumeration/removal. The kind of project that used to take a month or two.
What We Learned: Where AI actually helped, where it hallucinated, and why you still need to double-check your agents’ work.
Meeting Details:
Whether you are a seasoned professional or just getting started in the field, we invite you to join us at Virginia Western Community College in the Hall Family Business/Science Building. We’ll be meeting on the third floor in the CyberSecurity lab, Room M302.
Don’t wait until the last minute. General admission tickets for BSides Roanoke 2026 (June 5th) are available. Join us for a full day of technical talks and workshops right here in Roanoke.
The window is closing fast. If you have a breakthrough, a unique case study, or a tool you’ve been building, we want to see it on the big stage this June. If you submit after April 5th, it might be too late.
Between our immediate sessions this March and the countdown to our big event in June, there is a lot happening in the local security community. Here is a quick look at what’s inside this update:
March 12: RISE Meeting at VWCC: Logan Diomedi presents “NTLM Relaying – Tricks of the Trade.”
March 31: RBTC IT Security Forum CTF (Jeopardy-style).
June 5: BSides Roanoke 2026 – Tickets are officially on sale!
Last Call: The BSides CFP is closing soon for the June 5th main event.
RISE Meeting: NTLM Relaying – Tricks of the Trade
We are excited to welcome Logan Diomedi, who will be delivering a deep-dive session on the current state of the art in NTLM Relaying. This session serves as a comprehensive primer for those looking to master the “Tricks of the Trade” and rise from simple relaying to total domain royalty.
Whether you are an offensive practitioner or a defender, Logan will walk you through the essential tactics employed in modern environments. The talk will cover existing tooling, basic and advanced tactics, and the specific primitives required to navigate, and eventually rule, the complex attack surfaces of Active Directory.
The session will demonstrate how existing tools and basic tactics can be leveraged to seize control of a network environment.
Meeting Details:
We will be meeting at Virginia Western Community College in the Hall Family Business/Science Building. Take the stairs to the left and go to the third floor and go to the CyberSecurity lab in room M302.
Meeting Info:
Virginia Western Community College Business/Science Building, Room M302 March 12th, 2025 @ 6PM View Map
🎟️ Tickets Now Available: BSides Roanoke 2026
General admission tickets for BSides Roanoke 2026 are now officially available! Join us on June 5th, 2026, at Virginia Western Community College for a day of technical talks, workshops, and community networking.
It’s time to get those proposals in! This is your last call to submit for the CFP. If you have a talk, a workshop, or a cool project you’ve been working on, we want to hear from you.
Also, don’t miss the RBTC IT Security Forum: Hands on Security CTF on March 31.
Whether you’re a seasoned “gray-beard” IT pro or a “green” security n00b, this Jeopardy-style CTF is the premier professional cybersecurity event in the ROA/NRV area. Created by the RBTC IT Security Forum and run by the Virginia Cyber Range, it’s a great opportunity to connect and compete with the regional community.
We’re officially through the post-holiday slump, and it’s time to discuss the new year together. Let’s shake off the February chill with some good company and even better conversation!
Join your fellow cybersecurity pros for our February social; it’s the perfect chance to decompress, talk shop, and enjoy a cold beverage at one of our favorite local spots.
Vibe: Informal. No slides, no long-winded agendas; just peers swapping tales and learnings.
CFP Reminder: BSides Roanoke 2026
The clock is ticking! This is your friendly reminder that the Call for Presentations (CFP) for BSides Roanoke is winding down. We want your technical deep dives, your “I can’t believe I found this” stories, and your unique security perspectives.
Conference Date: Friday, June 5th, 2026
CFP Closes: This Month! Don’t wait until the last minute to get those talk ideas in.
