How often do you get the opportunity to get hundreds of guinea pi… …I mean, cyber security practitioners in one place? We couldn’t resist this chance to pick your brains and carry out some crowd-sourced research. So come along, meet some researchers and help us in informal, interactive workshops.
Workshop #1: Origin stories
Every hero has an origin story. What is yours?
Cyber security practitioners are a relatively new, rapidly changing profession. But where did we all come from? I bet none of your 10-year-old selves wanted to be cyber security practitioners when you grew up. So what did you want to be? And how did you end up where you are today?
Our CyberUK LiveLab aims to get a snapshot of the people in cyber security, looking at the skills, backgrounds and motivations of practitioners today. Discovering who we have in the field at the moment could really help us. For example, we could better tailor our guidance to support you, or have a clearer idea where to target recruitment into cyber security. So please come along and help us by telling your story.
Besides, it’ll involve lots of coloured pens and stickers. So what’s not to like? This LiveLab will be led by the NCSC and co-facilitated by the Creative Securities group at Royal Holloway.
Workshop #2: Characterising cyber health
With the variety and scope of attacks against systems, the ability to identify ‘what secure looks like’ becomes increasingly difficult. The issue surrounds understanding the amount and importance of different parts of an organisation and their contribution to defence. When discussing security, experts are able to apply a number of factors to begin to analyse a system, especially when many of those concepts might seem intangible.
By approaching the fundamental question of ‘What characteristics make a system secure?’, we aim to build an understanding of not only what makes systems secure, but begin to understand why that makes them secure. We’ll use inputs from the community – from their wide range of experiences – to help drive research into the field of metrics for cyber security, devising useful methods for engaging companies about the security that they have (and learning what they need).
Workshop #3: Help us build NCSC online services
You want free, easy-to-use and properly helpful tools? From us? You can have them – provided you’re part of LiveLabs at CyberUK, and help us build them.
The NCSC is building Active Cyber Defences (ACDs) and other online services to help you defend yourselves, and to help us all to defend the nation. They’re at different stages of readiness, from design sketches all the way to a working Beta system you can start using today (with us literally by your side!). So come and have a look, get involved, try the tools, and talk to us. Tell us what you like and what you don’t like, what makes sense and what doesn’t, and how the tools fit your circumstances – or not. This is an experiment after all, and we need you to give us the information that can make them better.
And don’t worry if you can’t make it to the stand, we’ll have questionnaires online you can fill in. So please get involved and help make our new tools be as good as they can be for the whole of the cyber security community.
Source: National Cyber Security Centre
