BSides Fredericton Returns Oct. 27 With AI Agents and Fraud on the Agenda

BSides Fredericton, the volunteer-run conference that calls itself New Brunswick's premier cybersecurity conference, returns to the Fredericton Inn at 1315 Regent St. on Oct. 27 and 28. The first day is ten talks in two rooms, the Bicentennial Ballroom and Salon A, free to attend with registration on Eventbrite. The second day is two hands-on workshops that run at the same time and need pre-registration.

The published program, dated Oct. 8 and marked subject to change, leans hard on one question: what happens when AI agents are handed real access to company systems. Fraud, critical infrastructure and careers fill the afternoon.

AI agents with access

The opening keynote at 9:15 a.m. is "Securing the Frontier: Navigating the AI & Agentic Attack Surface Without Compromise," from Saïd Izawi, a solutions engineer at Netskope.

Two security leaders take the 11:15 slot in opposite rooms. Rahim Pirani, security advisor at Saint John's Mariner Innovations, presents "Your Newest Employee Isn't Human — And It Has Access." Across the hall, Jason Keirstead, founding CTO of LangGuard, presents "Stop Runaway AI Before It Starts: Excessive Agency and AIUC Compliance." LangGuard is a San Francisco AI-governance startup with an office in Fredericton. Excessive agency is OWASP's name for giving an AI system more functions, permissions or autonomy than its job needs. AIUC-1 is a security and safety standard for AI agents.

Two morning talks extend the theme. Vaibhav Yadav of KPMG Canada covers "Cyber Recovery in the Age of AI." Magno Logan of GoHacking and Fellow.ai takes on software build pipelines in "Nobody's Mining Crypto Anymore: What Attackers Actually Want From Your CI."

Fraud, infrastructure and careers

At 2:30 p.m., David Shipley, CEO of Fredericton's Beauceron Security, presents "The Scamdemic: Why Online Fraud is doing 10X more damage than ransomware." The tenfold comparison comes from the talk's title. The program doesn't say what it is based on. Beauceron's most recent product news was Partner View, a console for managed-service providers.

The same slot in the ballroom goes to critical infrastructure. Jim Troutman of the Northern New England Neutral Internet Exchange and BSides Maine pairs with Cheryl Biswas of The Diana Initiative for "Do you want to play a game? How about Disabling Civilization?" Biswas also gives "Take Off! It's Our Great White North" at 1:30.

Manuel Charette, who leads cyber security at Fisheries and Oceans Canada from Moncton, presents "Career Hack: Design Resilient Growth."

The closing keynote at 3:45 p.m. is "No One Pings Alone: Community as a Service," from Julien Richard, vice-president of information security at Fredericton's Lastwall. Richard founded the Atlantic Cybersecurity Collective, a non-profit for security professionals. Lastwall was most recently in the news for placing its IDCommand Tactical product with Defense Unicorns.

From 4:30 to 7:30 p.m., the day rolls into the FreddySec afterparty. The organizers describe FreddySec as a casual monthly cybersecurity mixer.

Workshop day

Both workshops run from 9 a.m. to noon on Oct. 28, and space is limited. Workshop 1, "Surviving Machine-Speed Exploitation," is a real-time, hands-on test drive of the CrowdStrike Falcon platform. Workshop 2, "Minutes to Meltdown," is an incident simulation based on a group exercise from Commvault. It puts participants in the middle of a fast-moving, ransomware-style attack. Attendees pick their workshop when they register, as a CA$20 add-on on Eventbrite.

Who keeps it free

Fifteen organizations are listed on the sponsor page:

• Champions: Arctic Wolf, Beauceron Security, CrowdStrike, GoSecure, IMP Solutions, Nozomi Networks, Object First, Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler. The organizers said on X that these champions "help keep BSides Fredericton free for everyone."
• Partners: CGI, the Joint Economic Development Initiative and KPMG.
• Supporters: CMS Consulting, Netskope and Abnormal.

Several sponsors also have a place on the program. Netskope gives the opening keynote, KPMG and Beauceron each have a speaker, and the first workshop runs on CrowdStrike's platform. Two sponsors are Fredericton companies: Beauceron and CMS Consulting, an IT security and content-management consultancy in the Knowledge Park. JEDI, a partner, is a Fredericton-based Indigenous economic development organization. UNB's Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity is not on the list. In August, it hosted the city's other big security event of the year, the PST Cybersecurity Summit.

A conference that keeps coming back

The organizers' X account traces a stop-start history. It shows a Nov. 20, 2018 edition with an evening capture-the-flag, and a November 2019 edition whose Saturday workshops cost $20. In May 2022, the account announced that it was reactivating the event, with weekly volunteer planning meetings in Fredericton coffee shops. The May 2, 2023 event at the Fredericton Inn was billed as the fourth annual BSides conference held in the city. The November 2024 edition ran over two days, Nov. 6 and 7, with conference talks, a FreddySec afterparty and hands-on workshops. Sponsor GoSecure posted photos from a talk and the sponsor area that week.

The account's thank-you post that year credited a volunteer named Katherin with the event's current logo. The account posted nothing about a 2025 event. Its first 2026 post opened the call for presentations on Aug. 31.

Some of this year's speakers are returning. Shipley was on the 2023 lineup. Keirstead and Richard both spoke in 2024, and Keirstead was also on the 2018 program. Recordings of talks from both years are on the BSides Fredericton YouTube channel, including Keirstead's 2024 talk on generative AI in security operations.

The event belongs to the global BSides model, which its site describes as "a community-driven framework for building events for and by information security community members." The local edition says it is run by volunteers.

Fredericton's security industry grew out of NBTel, Q1 Labs and UNB, as our history of how Fredericton became a cybersecurity town explains. BSides is the part of that scene run by practitioners: free, held in a hotel ballroom, and ending with a mixer.

Sources

• BSides Fredericton — Conference Day
• BSides Fredericton — 2026 Conference Program (PDF, as of Oct. 8, 2026)
• Eventbrite — BSides Fredericton 2026
• BSides Fredericton — Sponsors
• @BSidesFrederict on X