SAINTCON is the annual cyber-security conference presented by the Utah Security Advisory and Incident Network Team (“UtahSAINT”).

This event is an IT and Cyber-Security Professionals conference with a hard focus on cyber-security topics.

The conference began in 2001 and has been held throughout the State of Utah.  Prior to 2013, this event was called the UtahSAINT Conference, but was renamed to be more recognizable and could flourish on its own.

Most people come to listen to the Presentations and Trainings, but year by year we continue to bring more and more elements into the conference. While the presentations are great, we provide a rich experience that allows attendees to focus on things that interest them the most.

Games and Contests are a major part of SAINTCON. Many people spend their entire time at the conference (and in their hotels) playing the Hackers Challenge game. Hackers Challenge was originally used to provide “Something else to do” during less interesting presentations, but has become a serious and high skills driven game that the attendees love to play.

Usually somewhere between $250-$350

SAINTCON ticket costs change from year-to-year based on the projected costs for the conference.  As a general cost-recovery conference, we will set the cost as low as possible to cover costs with a small margin of surplus to cover unexpected costs should they arise.

Probably not!

We do a lot of security education at SAINTCON, so it may be only natural for someone to be super-excited and test a new skill against their network-connected friends.  This is discouraged, but cannot be completely controlled.

We recommend that you come to the conference with a certain level of paranoia and protect yourself and your devices appropriately by using VPNs, and other methods.

No!

In fact we encourage you to bring younger attendees to SAINTCON. We have expanded this option in recent years, and have found that much of what we do and discuss is beneficial to High School students and younger.

SAINTCON has a long tradition of being a family-friendly environment, even though we do not monitor or enforce this culture.

POLICY:
All attendees younger than 18 years old, MUST be accompanied by an adult.

Nobody…

SAINTCON is a labor of love and has no paid staff.  The planning committee, staff, and volunteers only receive our gratitude and a couple of thank-you items and perks for their year-long-work.

Several years ago we started providing compensation for contractors and enhanced content providers for things like: Trainings, Keynotes, Badge design, etc.  These honorariums are very reasonable and often barely cover the cost of their time.

SAINTCON is a non-profit endeavor, and we spend nearly every dollar we collect from registration on the event each year.  We usually end up with around $15-20k/yr of surplus that we retain in a budget for the next year startup costs, and to pay organization bills (storage leases, subscriptions, accounting, etc.).

Loosely defined, MiniBadges are small electronic-based components, usually approximately 1″ by 1″ square designed on a circuit-board. 

MiniBadges are generally designed to plug into the SAINTCON Conference Badge for power and sometimes more.  The MiniBadge concept was the original brain-child of “zZq” and shared with the UtahSAINT Community.  Since the beginning, MiniBadge popularity has exploded with the average number of MiniBadges each year is well over the 17000.

Over the years, we have seen some incredibly creative designs, and many from individuals with little to no design experience.  Each year we are impressed to see how many new designs appear.  It is VERY common to now have ~8-10% of conference attendees bringing their own minibadges to SAINTCON to trade.

We highly encourage new-comers to check out and learn MiniBadge design skills.  It’s an extremely useful skill for the geeks in the world.  Minibadges can be super simple, or super complex.  We have seen minibadges with just 1 or 2 LEDs, to fully-functional computers designed to do various things.  Learning how to build them is not difficult, and we have several tutorials on YouTube to help you get started.

Basically the popularity of MiniBadges is not to different from Pokemon™ cards, Olympic pins, or other collectables.  Value is in the eye of the beholder.

Maybe…

SAINTCON is not just for IT and Security professionals, but is for anyone who has an interest in cyber-security. If cyber-security, hacking, security research, or other similar things interest you, you will likely enjoy SAINTCON.

No!

SAINTCON has of course grown from a strong interaction from Public Education but is not limited to this mission. We continue to expand the conference to include private corporations and non-education entities. We feel that this strengthens our conference and the UtahSAINT Organization. SAINTCON is open to anyone and everyone who would like to attend.

We will always continue however to have an education focus in key areas, however Network Security does not differ significantly in application.