BSides Tallinn 2026 drew more than 600 attendees to two days of defensive strategy, offensive research, and security operations. For its sixth consecutive year, the event covered threat research and detection engineering alongside the security team's own infrastructure problems.

Talks Worth Noting

Four sessions stood out across the program:

  • Iiro Uusitalo — How Threat Actors Weaponize DDoS in Games: a technical walkthrough of legally obtained source code from a real DDoS-for-hire "booter" service, covering the architecture and attack capabilities behind gaming disruption.
  • Zafer Balkan — Finding the Gaps Your Dashboard Cannot See: why SIEM dashboards hide critical blind spots by showing only what is visible, and how to measure missing telemetry, parsing failures, and silent data drops that leave detection systems exposed.
  • Siret Schutting — Language Matters: how anthropomorphized marketing language such as AI "hallucinations" misleads users and shapes large-scale security decisions, with practical responses for the security community.
  • Iuliia Laaneots — Nobody monitors the monitor: Chaos engineering for the security team's own infrastructure: writing a Business Continuity Plan for a security team's own SIEM platform, the risk of silent degradation where the platform stays up but detection rules quietly fail, and how to chaos-test that infrastructure.

Volunteering and the Stage

Volunteer slots were competitive enough this year that there was a waiting list. Serving as a stage moderator meant meeting these cybersecurity veterans both under the lights and behind the scenes.

Database Security as Cybersecurity

CYBERTEC PostgreSQL Services and Support, along with Hans-Juergen Schoenig and managers Rajneesh Verma and Rohit Gupta, supported the time spent volunteering — part of a path from the database world toward cybersecurity and governance-risk-compliance work.

Attending deep-dive events like BSides aligns with how CYBERTEC approaches managing PostgreSQL databases: security, compliance, and threat mitigation are treated as foundational pillars rather than afterthoughts. Immersion in the InfoSec ecosystem feeds cutting-edge practices back into the company's products and services, keeping customer data compliant and structurally airtight against modern threats.

Tickets for BSides Tallinn 2027 are already on sale. The next stop is PGConf.EU 2026 at https://2026.pgconf.eu/, where CYBERTEC is a Platinum Sponsor.