October Song

Welcome to October - also known as Cybersecurity Awareness Month! It will hopefully be a quieter month after the September jam-packed event schedule, although this year is showing no signs of slowing down!

I am sure all businesses are awaiting the Autumn budget at the end of the month - hopefully, there won't be too many nasty shocks for us all! If you are getting in the mood for Halloween, check out Eliza's post on Zombie Files, Ghost Files and ghastly ghouls!

So what happened last month?

Early in September, German air traffic control had its internal IT communications taken down by APT28 (also known as Fancy Bear.) TFL was also hit by an ongoing cyber incident which is thought to have affected 5,000 customers. A 17-year-old boy has been arrested over the attack and is currently bailed.

Moneygram, the popular money transfer site, was forced offline after suffering a cyber attack, although has said this was not due to ransomware. We have also seen that CosmicBeetle has released a new ransomware strain, targeting small and medium businesses across Europe and Asia.

So what have the dragons been up to?

It's fair to say we have been busy! From attending events such as Future of Cyber Manchester, and the Leeds Cyber Security Conference, to speaking on Personal Branding for LT Harper - Cyber Security Recruitment , and speaking at Stephen Mann 's Security Leadership Decrypted session on Cyber ROI it's been a busy month with lots of events. You can find my blog post on balancing Cyber Risk and ROI here on our website.

I am also just back from BSides Newcastle this weekend, which was a whole lot of fun! Check out my new favourite outfit!

Business-wise, we have been planning out custom security training for development teams as well as standard Security Training & Awareness, and Table Top Exercises for some of our customers as they prepare for Cyber Security Awareness Month.

Our Cyber MOTs are still very popular as a fast and efficient way to get a high-level view of your security posture - useful when planning where to spend your cyber security budget, or for someone new in post who wants a fast assessment and an external viewpoint of where to focus cyber defence efforts.

As well as standard web app penetration tests, more customers are asking us to perform a Cloud Security review to ensure no misconfigurations in their 3rd party hosted environments. If this is a concern for you, do reach out as we are starting to book November's tests.

This month we are also shouting about all of the fab features for our PocketSIEM service. My fave fab features have to be zero licensing fees and zero ingestion fees. If you want to find out more about our SOC Service, then do reach out!

What is coming up this month?

Friday 11th is the next Manchester 2600 meet-up at Piccadilly Bar & Kitchen.

Tuesday 15th I will be discussing Cyber Security on a Shoestring: Maximising Talent, Relevance and ROI at IT Expo in Birmingham There are still free tickets left!

Thursday 17th I will be in Glasgow for Hack Thursday - Discussing Enshitification of the Industry

Thursday 24th will be OWASP Manchesters' next meet-up and a Halloween Spooktacular!

Friday 8th November will be the 1st anniversary of the relived Manchester 2600 meetup so there will be cake and no doubt stickers to celebrate the occasion!

Don't forget if you want to keep up with regular cyber security news, we also have our award-nominated Daily Cyber Briefing at 8:30am every morning over at th4ts3cur1ty.company

If you have a cyber security challenge or are looking for a new security partner, then do reach out for a chat!

Have a great October!