BSides Cheltenham 2025: Cyber Community Meets Cyber Intelligence
Our Head of Communications, Lisa Ventura MBE FCIIS, attended Bsides Cheltenham on Saturday 19 July 2025. She provided some insights as to what she learnt at the event, and why the Bsides movement is so important in the cyber security industry.
BSides Cheltenham 2025 delivered on its core mission of building a safer digital world through community collaboration, a principle that directly aligns with HOOP Cyber’s data-driven approach to security operations.
I’m a huge fan of the Bsides movement, it is one of the cyber security industry’s most important grassroots initiatives. Bsides is a global network of community-driven security conferences that prioritise accessibility, collaboration, and knowledge sharing over commercial interests.
What Is the Bsides Movement?
Born from the recognition that mainstream security conferences had become increasingly expensive and vendor-focused, BSides events operate on a “by the community, for the community” philosophy, providing platforms where both seasoned professionals and newcomers can share real-world experiences, emerging threats, and innovative defensive strategies. These events deliberately maintain an intimate, inclusive atmosphere that encourages genuine dialogue and relationship-building, often featuring content that’s too cutting-edge, too niche, or too community-focused for larger commercial conferences. Indeed, this was very true of Bsides Cheltenham which included a series of “fireside chats” including a hard-hitting one on the phenomenon of Infosec influencers complete with a twist – the organisers handed out marshmallow s’more’s biscuits to the audience to complement the “fireside chats”, which was genius.
With hundreds of Bsides events now held annually across six continents, the movement has become an essential ecosystem for cyber security intelligence sharing, professional development, and the kind of organic collaboration that strengthens collective defence capabilities. The BSides model proves that some of the industry’s most valuable insights emerge not from vendor presentations or formal research papers, but from practitioners sharing their experiences, failures, and discoveries with peers who face similar challenges in the cyber security and infosec industry.
Key Intelligence from Top Industry Leaders
The event featured exceptional insights from Ollie Whitehouse, NCSC’s Chief Technical Officer, who reinforced a fundamental truth we champion at HOOP Cyber: transparency in software development is critical for effective security architecture. His observation that “we know more about what is in our sausages than our software” resonates deeply with our data lake methodology, where visibility and enrichment at point of ingestion creates the transparency needed for proactive threat detection.
Whitehouse’s emphasis on passkeys over passwords and making the UK “the most hostile place to target” aligns with our orchestrated defence approach of using enriched data streams to create adaptive, intelligence-driven security postures.
The Human Element in Data-Driven Security
Joe Tidy’s presentation on teenage hacking evolution highlighted a crucial gap in our industry: while we excel at building sophisticated detection systems, we must address the social and psychological factors that create threats in the first place. This mirrors our philosophy at HOOP Cyber that technology alone cannot solve cyber security challenges.
The most effective security operations combine advanced data processing capabilities with human intelligence and community knowledge sharing, exactly what BSides represents. I was also thrilled to meet Joe, get a selfie with him and have my copy of his new book “Ctrl Alt Chaos” signed by him.
Community Intelligence as a Security Asset
The networking and knowledge exchange at BSides Cheltenham demonstrated how community-driven intelligence enhances individual organisational defences. When cyber security professionals share real-world threat insights, attack patterns, and defensive strategies, it creates a collective intelligence that no single SIEM or data lake can replicate.
At HOOP Cyber, we integrate this community intelligence into our client architectures through threat intelligence enrichment and collaborative defence strategies. The conversations at BSides, from students to seasoned practitioners, represent the kind of diverse perspective that strengthens security operations across the entire ecosystem.
Operational Resilience Through Collaboration
Events like Bsides Cheltenham prove that cyber security is fundamentally a community endeavour. The technical presentations, combined with organic networking and knowledge transfer, create the collaborative foundation necessary for building truly resilient security operations.
This community-driven approach to cyber security intelligence perfectly complements the data-centric methodologies we deploy at HOOP Cyber. When human insight meets advanced data processing and orchestration, organisations achieve the kind of adaptive, intelligent defence that modern threats demand.
The future of cyber security lies not just in better technology, but in better collaboration between people, between organisations, and between the technical capabilities that enable both.
