Anders Reeves Blog

One of the main challenges that drew me to Information Security (and management in general) was that of helping to build a working culture that is genuine, sustainable and is aligned to support 'the vision'. I've had the benefit to have learned directly, and from the experiences of past bosses, leaders and mentors how not to approach cultural change initiatives: Knowing what bad change-approaches looks like, usually without any real clarity around what perfect (or even good! ) may be is a useful head-space to occupy. At least in the absence of knowing what to do, knowing what not to do provides a useful reference point. I find that this simple psychological tool helps me to sanity check if I'm falling into those past gotchas and traps as shared with me by the wise few who've been there, seen it, burnt that bridge, picked themselves up and started all over. Haven't we all? The challenge of raising Information Security awareness through driving a work

In the spirit of my ongoing InfoSec openness, here's the messaging I've prepared around our Group's education and call to action around WannaCrypt: **** Team, Many of you will have read about last week’s Global cyber attack that caused a number of organisations to be seriously impacted including the National Health Service in the UK and Telefonica in Spain. Over 70 countries were affected in total. The attack took the form of ‘ransomware’ that caused computer-held files to be made unreadable (encrypted) unless a payment was made to the attackers via the 'Bitcoin' online currency. Currently we have no reports of any impact to Group services or systems from this attack. The attack relied upon a combination of malicious software being run, poor IT configuration practices, and the exploit of older, unpatched/out-of-support systems such as Windows XP and 2003. The Group have a large and complex IT infrastructure that is continually being imp

This week sees the start of an exciting new chapter in our ever-maturing InfoSec story, with our Group Security team forming a new Security Operations Centre (SOC). It has been founded using key staff from our existing Network Information Security (NIS) and AppSec analyst capabilities and I believe we are taking an interesting approach to the its creation that sees us using our ASV ( Surecloud ) as our first internal SOC client: The rationale is simple - Surecloud's consultants are tasked with poking and probing our applications, network and supporting infrastructure (all BAU as part of our PCI-DSS routines), and our SOC is challenged to be able to report back to the testers what it is they did. To achieve this the new SOC team has been empowered (provided time, creative freedom, engineering resource access and budget) to architect whichever technical solution(s) they require to be gain the required insight, and so a Red/Blue team dynamic is born between 'them' a