Cracking the Code at Bletchley
A room full of ITSM leaders, a ransomware mystery, and one of the most famous codebreaking sites in history. Not a bad way to start a cyber security conversation.
26.02
Bletchley,
UK
2026
On 26th February, we went to hallowed ground: The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. The setting couldn't have been more fitting. Once the nerve centre of Allied codebreaking, it played host to the ITSMF cyber security event, a gathering of IT Service Management leaders exploring where service operations and security collide.
And to kick the day off, we brought a live cyber incident with us. We opened the morning with The Breach - an immersive ransomware whodunnit where teams race to uncover how a company was compromised before time runs out.
Highlights
Before the first keynote had even begun, teams were already deep into investigation mode.
A fictional company, High Tech Inc, had been locked down by ransomware. The attackers claimed they'd only needed a single stolen credential to break in. Five suspects. Five possible attack paths. Five possible locations. The task? Piece together the evidence and call the hacker to retrieve the decryption key.
Participants sifted through suspicious emails, phone records, CCTV stills, and social media profiles while debating which employee had unknowingly opened the door. There were plenty of theories, a few wrong turns, and more than one moment of sudden realisation when the final clue clicked into place.
It was noisy, collaborative, and occasionally chaotic... exactly what you'd expect from a real incident response scenario. Because that's the point. Cyber incidents don't arrive neatly in packaged frameworks and slide decks. They arrive as service disruptions, escalations, frantic cals, and decisions made under pressure.
And that's precisely the reality ITSM professionals deal with.
The wider event carried that conversation forward, with speakers including Valerie Wilson, Service Operations Director at BT, alongside other industry voices discussing how cyber risk increasingly sits inside day-to-day service operations.
Starting the day with an immersive experience set the tone perfectly. Instead of talking about security behaviours in theory, attendees experienced firsthand how small gaps can spiral into a full-blown incident.
At Bletchley Park, where codebreaking once changed the course of history, it felt especially appropriate to remind ourselves of a modern truth: cyber security isn't confined to security teams anymore. It lives in service desks, operation centres, and incident bridges across every organisation.
And if the buzz in the room was anything to go by, the ITSM community is more than ready for that conversation.
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