A handful of people from silicon valley (myself included) have been discussing the lack of good hacker conference in the bay area (RSA does not count) for some time and decided to meet up during defcon to see what  we could do about this.  It was concluded that the only logical thing to do, was to create a conference to address this gap. This new conference was dubbed  'BayThreat' and this morning the formal announcement went out to The Web Security Mailing List (which I moderate).

Announcement:

"A new Information Security conference has come to the Bay Area. BayThreat is a two day event at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA on December 10th and 11th. The theme for BayThreat is as simple as black & white: "Building & Breaking Security." There will be two tracks, each tackling opposite sides of the security fence. As Security Professionals, it is up to us to take that dichotomy and mold it into =the shades of gray we use to protect our environment.

The speaker line-up includes new material and also brings some of the big speeches that were well received earlier in the year to a west coast venue. Jeremiah Grossman will be talking about Website Security Statistics over 3 years, Dan Kaminsky will be talking about DNSSEC and the coming Domain Key Infrastructure, Dino Dai Zovi will be giving his Mach RPC talk, Anton Chuvakin will be discussing lessons learned while implementing SIEM, and Allen Gittelson will demonstrate mindhacking.

There's also several activities planned for BayThreat, such as a lockpicking village and an Escalation of Privileges card tournament. Check out the website for the full list of speakers and activities planned for this exciting event at www.baythreat.org.

-Marisa Fagan"