Community / Events / BSides Porto 2026
Cyber Academy at BSides Porto 2026
Research, community, and real-world security — Cyber Academy joined BSides Porto to exchange ideas with the wider security community, contribute technical research, and strengthen the connection between cybersecurity education and industry practice.
BSides Porto 2026 brought together researchers, practitioners, speakers, and security teams from across the community.
Cybersecurity grows through shared knowledge. Conferences such as BSides Porto create a space where researchers, practitioners, educators, and security teams can exchange ideas, challenge assumptions, and discuss the problems shaping the industry.
On June 27, Cyber Academy joined the security community in Porto for BSides Porto 2026, contributing to a full day of technical discussions spanning offensive security, application security, AI, cloud, software supply chains, SOC operations, and emerging threats.
For Cyber Academy, participating in BSides Porto was more than attending another security conference. It was an opportunity to engage directly with the Porto security community, learn from other practitioners, contribute original research, and bring those experiences back into the work we do with students and the wider cybersecurity community.
A packed conference environment built around technical exchange and community participation.
Technical Research
From AI Security to Software Supply Chains
The afternoon brought together four members of our wider security community across two technical sessions, covering two areas that are becoming central to modern cybersecurity: AI security and software supply-chain security.
Attacking LLM Inference with Special Token Injection (STI)
The session explored security risks surrounding Large Language Model inference and the use of Special Token Injection, examining how behavior at the token level can create unexpected attack opportunities in AI systems.
As AI becomes embedded into applications, development workflows, security products, and business processes, understanding how these systems can be manipulated is increasingly important for both offensive and defensive security professionals.
CI/CD Rootkitting: When the Build System Betrays You
The research focused on a difficult modern software-security problem: what happens when the source code is clean, security checks pass, but the infrastructure responsible for building the software has already been compromised?
The talk examined attacks against CI/CD environments and software supply chains, showing why organizations cannot rely exclusively on source-code security when the systems responsible for producing and distributing software may themselves become part of the attack path.
Security research becomes more valuable when it moves beyond the lab and becomes part of an open conversation with the community.
Community
Engaging With the Porto Security Community
One of the most valuable parts of BSides events is what happens beyond the presentations. BSides Porto brought together professionals from offensive security, red teaming, SOC operations, DevSecOps, cloud security, application security, IoT, and artificial intelligence.
Cyber Academy used that opportunity to meet practitioners, exchange experiences, discuss ongoing research, and introduce more people to the work being developed by our team and community.
Conversations at the community area extended the exchange beyond the conference sessions.
These conversations matter because cybersecurity education cannot exist separately from the security community it is preparing people to join. Technologies evolve, attack techniques change, and new research areas emerge continuously.
By engaging with communities such as BSides Porto, Cyber Academy stays connected to those developments and to the people actively researching, testing, defending, and building within the field.
Education Meets Practice
Bringing Industry Experience Back Into Education
Cyber Academy's approach centers on practical cybersecurity. Students should not only understand concepts — they should understand how those concepts appear in real systems, how attacks develop, how defenders investigate them, and how security professionals communicate their findings.
Participation in conferences such as BSides Porto strengthens that connection between education, research, and real-world practice. Discussions around AI security, CI/CD infrastructure, supply-chain compromise, offensive security, detection, and modern attack techniques do not end when the conference session finishes.
They become knowledge that can influence future labs, research, discussions, and learning experiences.
Cyber Academy represented its community and research culture throughout the event.
Beyond Borders
Building Connections Across the Security Community
Cybersecurity is inherently global. An attack technique researched in one country can affect organizations worldwide, while an idea shared by one researcher can help another team thousands of kilometers away.
BSides Porto provided another opportunity for Cyber Academy to build those connections. Meeting researchers, discussing ongoing work, exchanging perspectives, and sharing our own research helps create relationships that extend beyond individual conference sessions.
It also supports a broader goal: connecting the cybersecurity community we are building at home with practitioners and researchers across Europe.
More Than a Conference
Research Shared. Connections Built. Knowledge Brought Back.
For Robert Shala and Armend Gashi of Sentry, and Përparim Mjeku and Rinor Shehu of Cyber Academy, BSides Porto 2026 was an opportunity to contribute research in two important areas of modern security.
For Cyber Academy, it was also an opportunity to listen, learn, exchange ideas, and deepen its engagement with the international cybersecurity community.
Developing the next generation of cybersecurity professionals requires more than teaching what is already known. It requires staying close to the people discovering what comes next.
