OWASP London at JP Morgan (NCSAM 2018)

Due to the fact October is considered National Cyber Security Awareness Month (aka NCSAM) we were planing an OWASP London Chapter meetup. The meetup was hosted by JP Morgan at Canary Wharf, and it was an opportunity to deliver a talk around Cyber Security and how (cyber)threats have been evolving over the years. 

This time our lineup of talk included:

• "If You Liked It, You Should Have Put Security On It" - Zoë Rose (@5683Monkey)
• "Lessons From The Legion (The OWASP London Remix)" - Nick Drage (@SonOfSunTzu)
• "A holistic view on Cyber Security in evolutionary terms (food-for-thought)" - Dr. Grigorios Fragkos (@drgfragkos)

Cyber Security Awareness Month 2018

October is known as Cyber Security Awareness Month and in the US it is commonly referred as National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM). This is a global initiative to raise awareness on emerging Cyber threats and best practices to defend against them, while educating the public and the private sector, on how to tackle cyber security challenges in a fast-evolving digital ecosystem.

‘Security’ is the enabler for evolving and scaling up in a secure manner, while minimising the risk of being affected at an irrecoverable level.

Cyber Security is promoted at an impressive rate during this month, with several awareness campaigns taking place. Typically, these campaigns focus on giving advice around having best-in-class practices when it comes to Cyber Security, sharing thoughts around exposure to unnecessary risk and try to communicate the benefits from having a Cyber Resilience strategy in place, while discussions around defence-in-depth tend to spawn recommendations around different products and services that might help an organisation’s security practice. 

To achieve this, during October several events take place to engage and educate the information security community, while focusing on sharing knowledge, lessons learned, and forward-looking ideas.

Boardroom Briefing on Cyber Risk Exposure, in M&A and deal-flow scenarios

To understand and simplify the current Cyber Risk exposure in Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), this article focuses on explaining the inner workings and what is currently the state of affairs in the Cyber front, from a deal-flow perspective, while being structured as an informative boardroom briefing. 

"Understanding the Cyber related risks in M&A in this digital era, is an 'investment metric' for a successful decision-making process"

Before jumping into specifics, and to put things in the right context, consider for a moment that every business entity is more or less similar to an alive ecosystem; that is composed of people, services, synergies, cooperation, products, ideas, technologies, dependencies, and advances on different fronts. Effectively, as business entities evolve, by adapting the digital model of operations, the nature of their risk exposure equally evolves due to the numerous emerging Cyber-threats.