GNGB has had the privilege of being able to attend the 2024 Australian Cyber Conference. The theme for this year is the ‘Future is Now’ which aims to capture the intersection of cutting-edge innovation and the paramount need for cyber security in our ever growing technological age. The big questions that were raised at this conference stemmed around, “how do we safeguard our digital landscapes which are such an integral part of our everyday lives”.
We asked out team representatives Ross Daws our Chief Information and Security Officer and Mary Costello our Operations Support Manager, to share some of their learnings from the conference. From their reflections, the theme of the “Future is now” was clear, recognisable and consistent with how as business we need to shift our frame of thinking.
Ross Daws
I’ve been able to attend and do a deep dive into incidents and what learnings can be gained for preparing for and responding to cyber incidents. Having multi-disciplinary teams to respond to incidents in real time is prevalent for being able to tackle incidents appropriately adequately as each team member will bring different a diverse range of skills and experience which come together to successfully respond in a time of crisis.
An example used to highlight the importance of having mulit-disciplinary teams was of the 2018, Singapore Health breach. This example of learning about insider threat incidents and challenges around preventing this highlighted the importance that we often forget most incidents occur from the ‘inside’, focus primarily lies on the outside. As business’ how do we think about incident scenarios that respond and prepare for both ‘insider and ‘outside’ threats?
A large highlight of the event also included attending a seminar run by our own director Michael Collins. In this sessions, Michael’s aim was to get us to unpack our own thinking systems. He shined a light on how we think, and how that thinking skews or disadvantages our thinking about cybersecurity, and the lack of effectiveness that is the natural outworking of us failing to consider and critique our own thinking.
Overall, this week has been Illuminating, insightful, and slightly confronting, CyberCon 2024 is proving to be a great immersion experience in where our thinking and action needs to proceed as we stare down the barrel of 2025 and beyond!
Mary Costello
At this year’s Cyber Con, the theme “The Future is Here” really hits home. AI and Quantum technologies are no longer just emerging—they’re actively being implemented across various industries. However, it’s important not to overlook the fundamental cybersecurity practices while embracing these exciting new advancements!
One standout session was led by Jess Mollini and Ben Di Marco. From AWS, Jess is a strong advocate and active participant in our ecosystem response exercises, she shared some valuable insights around preparedness for security breaches. Many organizations face a low tolerance for cybersecurity risks, and failures can create operational and cultural challenges for security leaders. This underscores the importance of building and testing resiliency—ensuring that when failures do occur, they are managed in a controlled and graceful manner. I particularly appreciated the emphasis on the word graceful!
Another key takeaway on Incident Response is, What Happens on Day 2? Response teams and organizations must “keep calm” when an incident occurs. Building muscle memory and practicing your response plan is crucial so your team isn’t overwhelmed when, not if, an incident strikes.
