Between Friday and Saturday I attended together with my colleague Jori (you might know him doing your RIPE Sponsorship tickets or tunnels) the craziest and biggest cybersecurity conference in Helsinki, called Disobey.fi — which has now grown to over 2500 attendees.
I started coming here in 2018, when it was still at its previous location Kattilahalli, before it moved to Kaapelitehdas. That first year I joined the volunteers and tried to help around a bit, while it was only my second time ever being in Finland.
Over the years I tried to stay with the volunteering while the organisation grew and scaled out. This year was the first year where a lot of newcomers were chosen to join the volunteers, which led me to switch to the community village instead.
For people not familiar with the Finnish scene: most larger cities in Finland have assembled their own meetup groups which organise meetups, conferences, camps, cruises, lunches, drinks and other events. In total I would say it is one of the most active scenes I have seen in Europe.
During Disobey there is a separate room designated for booths (or tables, to be more precise) where each bigger city can advertise themselves, talk to people and promote their events. To encourage interaction — it’s Finland after all — gamification was used with things like stamp cards you could fill if you spoke to all communities and sometimes solved their challenges.
I got to hang out and talk to a lot of people this way and also found new speakers and workshops for my community turkusec.fi.
Apart from that, socialising was mostly important and watching a few talks.
From my personal perspective, if you want to watch two talks:
https://disobey.fi/2026/profile/disobey-2026-439-committing-css-crimes-for-fun-and-profit
A very good talk about browser vulnerabilities.
https://disobey.fi/2026/profile/disobey-2026-395-behind-closed-doors-physical-red-team-tactics
A great physical pentesting talk.
I am sure they will show up on the Disobey YouTube channel soon, and maybe we can also get Disobey onto more open platforms like PeerTube — although someone will have to maintain that.
Another fun part of the conference is the CTF. I was not participating this year, but it is always fun to see the obnoxious gifts for the winners. If you do not know what I mean, watch the closing events from the last few years on Disobey.
The badge is currently in my backpack and once I get home I will definitely play with it.
Today I am travelling back home from Helsinki and it is mayhem on the trains. It seems the winter holiday start made all trains fully booked, which is difficult when travelling with an Interrail pass — especially when using the last day plus an inbound and outbound day.
If you want to come to the event: presale is always crazy, but you can also attend disarray.fi which is smaller but takes place on a cruise ferry — coming this autumn.
A last takeaway from my side: we will start a survey to see if the customer base is feasible to also start operations in Finland for internet providing, as we already do in D/A/CH/LI and BE/NL/FR.