WWHF Deadwood 2025
October 8 - October 10
Wild West Hackin’ Fest is the cybersecurity conference organized and hosted by Black Hills Information Security, and Deadwood, SD is where it all began!
It all started with a bet between John Strand and his wife, Erica Spurrier.
John had been an instructor and course author for the SANS Institute for years at this point, and Erica bet that if John gave a class on his own, in South Dakota where they live, that people would come.
So they started asking around among John’s friends and colleagues. Before long, the idea evolved into something more than just a single class. They would host a small cybersecurity conference in Deadwood, a small tourist town about 40 miles northwest of Rapid City, SD. The Wild West Hackin’ Fest was born…
Tentative Plan: I will be giving a workshop on how to install, run, and customize local large language models (LLMs) on ordinary computer systems. More details as they evolve!