Five insights from the Security Watercooler

Last week we trialled an idea for running short video calls for people to share knowledge and experiences of different security topics. We called these Security Watercoolers and had a great response.

These are the five most interesting things - aligned to NIST Cybersecurity’s Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover - that we learned from the sessions last week:

A risk universe provides a structured way to categorise things that have happened in the past, and think about what may happen in the future, when identifying risk scenarios relevant to your organisation. More on risk universes.

It takes 66 days to form a new habit and so security education programmes need to be built around lots of little nudges, rather than a compliance-focussed one-off training session. More on timely, remote security education.

We have just ‘massively simplified our corporate networks.’ With the vast majority of devices no longer on the main company LAN, you can use this as an opportunity to go threat hunting for unusual traffic back at base for devices that may be compromised or misconfigured. More on adapting detection to remote working.

Conducting incident response remotely can make investigations faster, but with childcare responsibilities and more flexible working arrangements, you need to make sure you’re clear on escalation paths and delegation of authority. More on remote IR

Use data to understand how your recovery from a high-profile cyber security incident is being received. You need to think about collecting it now (speak to brand teams) in order to have a useful baseline to work from. (And don’t forget your employees!) More on communicating recovery.

From an organisation point of view we learned a few things, too:

• you prefer to have the details as diary invites, than emails… So we are looking at a way to do that, without inviting you all and disclosing everyone’s email addresses
• it is difficult to manage subscription preferences via Google form… So we are looking at how we can use mailing software respectfully
• there is a lot of appetite for more of these sessions! … So we will look to organise more of them in the coming weeks.

The jury is still out on when the best time of day is, let us know when suits you best via the feedback form.

You can also use the form to give us any other feedback (what went well? and even better if…) that you’d like.

Thanks again to Phil Huggins, Tim Ward, Tim Orchard, Stephanie Albertina and Jessica Lennard for their time and experience on each of our Security Watercoolers last week!

Photo credit: William Iven on Unsplash.