Last month, we met up for our second BridewellCon – our annual company conference! Building on the success of last year’s inaugural BridewellCon, this year was bigger and better with new guest speakers, activities, and an even bigger Bridewell team.
Read on for our highlights and some images from the event.
What is BridewellCon?
BridewellCon is our annual company conference where our employees from across the UK and US come together to catch up, hear key updates from the rest of the business, and talk about the next steps on Bridewell’s growth journey. As well as hearing from different areas within the business, we also invite industry leaders and experts to share their insights and experiences.
With our continued growth over the last year - including the acquisition of Arculus in March - this year we had more than 230 of the Bridewell team joining us at CenterParcs Woburn for two days of talks, activities, and other opportunities to get social. (A special thank you to our dedicated security analysts who missed the event to maintain our 24x7 Security Operations Centre!)
What Did We Get Up To?
Business Update
We kicked off day one with an introduction from Anthony Young, our CEO, and Ben Vaughan, our Chief Commercial Officer, who presented on the current state of the UK cyber market and Bridewell’s role within it.
Speaking to our mission of creating a safe and inclusive digital world, they also shared some insight into how Bridewell will continue to expand in the coming years and protect more businesses across the UK and US. They also looked at the importance of our partner relationships, including our recently announced partnership with Forescout, and our continued collaboration with Microsoft.
Table Top Exercise and Capture the Flag
To share some insight into what a successful ransomware attack could look like, we ran a roleplay/ tabletop exercise simulating the chaos of discovering your business has fallen victim to an attack. With the business split up into groups, we navigated our way through the scenario while fielding an onslaught of calls from journalists, APT groups, suppliers, customers, and regulators. A special shoutout to Ben Fuery, Associate Director – Cyber Security, Gavin Knapp, Cyber Threat Intelligence Principal Lead, and James John, Incident Response Manager for organising and their acting skills.
We also got a look into the world of open source intelligence (OSINT) with Luiz Simpson, our Head of Red Team, running a capture the flag activity. In our groups, we put our OSINT skills and techniques to the test as we solved dozens of challenges within the time limit. Using a combination of lateral thinking and quick research, our teams were identifying locations from reflections in car windows, determining the weight limit of a ship’s helicopter pad, obtaining the IP address of a specific camera feed, and a lot more.
Guest Speakers
Alongside our internal speakers, we were also joined by:
- Jake Humphrey (television presenter, podcaster, author) who spoke to us about high performance lessons and taught us a new perspective on what ‘high performance’ really means.
- Lesley Kipling (Chief Cybersecurity Advisor, Microsoft EMEA) also took the stage to discuss the importance of collective defence.
Sports, Spa, and Shuffling
We also spread out across Centre Parcs, taking up all the activities on offer. From archery and laser tag to katakanuing (yes, that is a word) and spa, we had everything covered. Some of us even braved the aerial drop.
BridewellCon wouldn’t be complete without some disco and this year didn’t disappoint. This year we were especially lucky to have Becks Taylor, our Digital Marketing Specialist, take the role of lead choreographer.
A special thank you to everyone across the Bridewell team for getting so involved and making the event such a success. A big thank you as well to our HR team for organising a great event. Here’s to next year!
Want to join the team? Take a look at our current vacancies over on our careers page.
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