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What better way to celebrate Cyber Awareness Month than with a breach?

Posted on 1 October 2019

It’s Cyber Awareness Month in the US and what better way to celebrate than with a new Cyber function in Chicago and a simulated breach to show executives it’s time to get Cyber savvy?

It’s all things Cyber Security at Stanton House right now with our experts scattered across the UK, APAC and USA and the team in London are getting creative with their awareness training.

Some like presentations, others prefer round-table events and some produce pdfs.

We on the other hand like to throw a bunch of executives into a very surreal, live, simulated, data-breach and then make them fix it, quick.

Two weeks ago, we hosted the first of our gamified event series titled: How would you respond to a Data Breach?

It was terrifying, thought-provoking, exciting and a huge success.

More than 20 senior executives from a multitude of industries and disciplines joined us in our City office for the simulation. They were given a company profile and had to get into character quickly as they would soon become the Executive Board for a listed company which was facing very public issues with their online security.

They were then given several injects of information from the Legal, Finance, Technology and Marketing divisions; as well as the outside world, and had to piece together the severity of the alleged breach – a breach they knew nothing about.

From the initial technology malfunction, the guests had to work together in teams to work out if a hack had even taken place, where the attack had hit and who was affected. They also had to deal with a simulated press conference, concerned customers on social media and stakeholders asking questions they might not have the answers to.

By the third briefing, teams were questioning if this was a business-ending attack and if they too were about to face the end of their career – taking an empathetic approach to the hack and applying it back to their very own organisations.

We understand that Cyber Security can be overwhelming and it’s not something that is easily understood by professionals outside of the industry. This event offered our network a real-life insight into a Cyber Breach as it happened and taught the professionals taking part, how to respond.

Not only was this event insightful, thought-provoking and eye opening but it was interactive, fun and exciting and offered a truly unique but surreal experience, giving our executive guests the answers to take back to their own Board.

For us, this is the very definition of Cyber Awareness.