Attending BSides London.

Travelling to London is always a treat, but that is doubly the case if it’s for a security conference! Of course, Security BSides isn’t just any security conference.

Starting life as an alternate event to Black Hat Briefings in the US, BSides has grown to a global series of conferences and related events, numbering over 30 for 2019.

To a large part this success can be attributed to BSides being community driven, free to attend and geared towards giving new speakers a platform.

BSides London fit this bill perfectly, with one of its four tracks being totally given over to rookie speakers. The pre-conference workshops also followed this approach with two extended sessions aimed at those new to the field.

The main event kicked off with a heartfelt and largely informal welcome address, followed by two main talks covering cyber systems of the power grid and user profiling and tracking on smartphone apps. Following these two talks the rookie track and track three also opened up. The tree main tracks all presented talks of 30 minute to one hour, while talks on the rookie track were limited to 15 minutes. This short form worked particularly well and attending the rookie track was particularly enjoyable.

Although BSides London presented a great range of security talks and the requisite side events such as a CTF and lock picking, one of the most notable talks was a full hour on track one devoted to mental health and wellbeing. Olga Zilberberg, who specialises in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Neuro Linguistic Programming, lead the session. Focussing on the symptoms and mechanics of stress, anxiety and depression, the inclusion of such a talk on the main stage exemplifies the different approach taken by BSides and is one of the many reasons that we will be back next year!

Videos from the event can be found here.