About Cydea

We are Cydea, an optimistic cyber security consultancy.

#RansomAware: stop shaming, share intelligence and fight back against ransomware attacks

Today, the world is seeing businesses of all sizes suffer devastating attacks from ransomware. In the last few months, massive attacks on Colonial Pipeline and JBS have disrupted services and earned cybercriminals millions of pounds. These attacks have been well-publicised, their CEOs have been openly talking about the incidents, G7 leaders have discussed the issue, and it’s prompted questions in boardrooms across the country. Until recently all but the most significant ransomware attacks have been kept out of the spotlight, with businesses opting to pay the ransom to restore services, and sometimes not letting their customers know.

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Announcing Cydea x Good Causes

Since founding Cydea eighteen months ago our mission has been to bring positive security to the world. Some of that is contributing to open source projects or releasing tools free of charge through cydea.tools. From the outset, part of that vision has always been that we will give back as best we can to charities and nonprofits that do amazing things. We’re fortunate enough now to be in a position to help and so that’s why I’m proud to be launching Cydea x Good Causes.

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Hello, World! from cydea.Tools

Introducing cydea.Tools, a collection of the tools we use in our client work and that are now freely available for any infosec team to pick up and accelerate their cyber security programme. I’ve written before about positive security and our desire to dispel fear, uncertainty and doubt. The old asymmetric threat adage pits embattled security teams in am impossible fight against ‘bad guys’ that share their tactics, techniques and procedures and only need to ‘get it right once.

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Racial discrimination is systemic within information security

As I wrote in my weekly infosec newsletter over the weekend: You will, no doubt, have seen some of the horrific coverage of violence used against protesters this week… You may feel detached or removed from events however the issues are systemic and pervasive even in a ‘modern’ field like cyber security. The language we use is important. Our profession is littered with examples of out-dated terminology that has no place in modern business:

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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.

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Join us at the Security Watercooler

This week we are trialling this idea: gather round the (virtual) Security Watercooler to share some knowledge, discuss ideas and chat with peers. [UPDATE: You can find our reflections and insights from this trial here] Many of us are doing the right thing by staying at home to save lives, and that can lead to things becoming monotonous. The Security Watercooler is ~25 min video calls to break up the day and showcase different viewpoints.

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