The first members meeting of 2019 kicked off on Wednesday 27th March at the amazing venue of One London Bridge with as packed an agenda as ever and an enthusiastic over-subscribed sign-up well before the actual date!.
After welcoming our visitors with some drinks the (ISC)² London Chapter Secretary Liz Banbury provided a brief overview of the Chapter updates, most notably being the progress around the Education initiative. This is one of our key initiatives which in parallel looks at building partnerships and alliances with London-based communities with a focus on educating people against scams and cyberbullying and reaching out to Universities who we could work with to strengthen and develop our profession by encouraging people to join us as a profession.
An initial communication and letter of intent have been sent out to more than 50 recipients across both these domains!
Members next had the opportunity to listen to a presentation from our keynote speaker, Bertram Dorn, a Solution Architect from AWS who specializes in security and compliance and provided a very engaging and interactive talk exploring the Technical and Non-Technical aspects of Cloud adoption and how to mitigate the risks along the way.
A panellist was then called up to the front where they were asked some key questions by Chapter President James Packer on the ‘Human Element’ of Information Security and how it aligns with current industry topics’. The panellists: Graham Morgan, whose career has spanned various key roles within the Royal Navy; Stuart Peck, who heads up the Cyber Security Strategy for ZeroDayLab and Dr. Adrian Davis who is a lead of Standards and Partnership at ObjectTech Group Ltd [and in addition has inside experience of (ISC)² , having until recently served as a Managing Director, (ISC)² EMEA] provided a highly entertaining insight in response to the questions ‘Have you, in the panel, or the audience, been a target of a social engineering attack?’ into the horror stories of how as individuals they have all fallen prey to the simple tricks of phishing scams and other methods of identity theft within both their work and personal lives.
What this highlighted is that we all fallible and it is very easy to become complacent with regards to safeguarding your data! These conversations are important because it ties in with a key part of why we, as the
(ISC)² London Chapter want to exist and that is if ‘we’ who are meant to be SME’s and interested persons around the subject of security fall prey, then how much more vulnerable are those who have no interaction with the subject and are that much less knowledgeable with what risks are associated with the information and technology that they use both at home and at work?