This talk will cover some of the most advanced attacks that are in the public domain, mostly attributed in public by commercial organizations. This talk will give a whirlwind tour of some of the high end of threat activity to set out a context of changing cybersecurity landscape.
The second part will talk about what controls we apply in Government that help defend against the most advanced attacks. The spoiler warning here is that most of these are not actually really fancy advanced and complex stuff, it's the things that people already know they should do, but are hard to do.
I'll cover a few different things, such as requiring MFA for everyone, reducing your administrative accounts, securing your endpoints effectively, along with a bonus tip around defending your CI systems.
You'll walk away from this talk with a better appreciation of why security matters, and some of the simple but hard things that you should be doing in your enterprise and application system stacks to ensure that you are a hard target.
Speaker
Michael Brunton-Spall
Deputy Director Cyber Policy and Solutions @Cabinet Office
Michael is Deputy Director of Cyber Policy and Capabilities in the Government Security Group within the Cabinet Office. Michael has been working in Government for over a decade now, having joined the Government Digital Service shortly after the launch of GOV.UK, and worked on securing government transformation during adoption of cloud, agile and devops movements.
Michael has built software in a variety of industries, from embedded systems to real time trading systems, games consoles to large content management systems. He has been a regular speaker at international conferences on the topics of Agile, DevOps, Security and Technical Architecture for nearly 10 years now. Michael is a published author and recognised expert in cybersecurity, and he still writes code when someone lets him.