Security Conference Websites Are Mostly Bad

I look at a lot of websites for security conferences.

A security conference website should be the authoritative source of truth for anyone looking to attend. This is not always the case. Allow me to illustrate this by showing two examples I stumbled upon this morning.

A friend sent me screenshot of a Linkedin post where a conference, examplecon, announced their CFP for 2027 was now open. Great!

I head to their website examplecon[.]com but don’t see any information on their homepage about it. The navbar has a Conference 2027 which does indeed have information about the dates of the conference, despite the url being examplecon[.]com/2026-schedule. This is great, but there is still no information about where to submit the CFP.

I just so happened to know that the url examplecon[.]com/cfp existed since I had last year’s CFP saved, but the link does not appear anywhere on their site.

If you go to examplecon[.]com/cfp, you are greeted with information for the 2027 conference. Great, it’s updated! Except when you click “Submit Your CFP” it takes you to cfp.examplecon[.]com/2026/cfp which shows the submission is closed… for the the previous year’s conference, not 2027 conference.

Changing the URL from cfp.examplecon[.]com/2027 finally gets you to the page where you can submit the page. The cherry on top was I happened to give this info to an agent to save the info and it gave me a disclaimer that the wordpress install was likely doing some nefarious things.

Sure enough…

Another site just had it’s homepage…. fall? Please refrain from implementing GRAVITY on your website’s homepage.

Cloudflare? Why?

A number of conferences I was looking at were sitting behind cloudflare. I promise you, your conference webpage does not need to sit behind cloudflare bot protection.

The goal of a conference page should be an authoritative source of truth for your conference, dates mostly, you can do all of this with a static website.

If you’re running a website where people go to for information about an event, please keep it up to date and please make it a reference page. Sponsors are fine, Russian casino sites and gravity are not fine.

In all seriousness, a simple reference table with the following information would make a conference homepage much more valuable to attendees.