Cydarm and Retrospect Labs support Australian women in cyber comp

Cydarm and Retrospect Labs have partnered to support the 2022 Australian Women in Security Network Response Competition.

The week-long, national incident style response exercise competition run by Retrospect Labs is being held for the second consecutive year from 7-14 November.

The company says the competition aims to test the skills and support the career development of 250 women across all aspects of cyber incident response. 

This ranges from technical remediation and forensics through to security breach reporting and legal requirements.

The competition will involve the simulation of a real-world cyber incident developed by Retrospect Labs, which will be enabled, enhanced and rolled out to remotely distributed and located participants using Gauntlet, which is Retrospect Labs' cyber security exercise platform. 

In addition, Cydarm's case management platform will be available for use by participants to enable team collaboration during incident response activity.

Five participants in each team will be composed of individuals with different knowledge foundations and expertise. Further to this, in order to ensure that the competition is as fair as possible, teams will be made up of women based on their individual, self-identified strengths. 

Teams will be able to move through the competition at their own pace, completing tasks along the way and communicating via a Slack channel. They will also have access to a mentor to support their journey through the exercises in their own moments of need.

The competition will include forensic artefacts that participants can analyse to identify various Indicators of Compromise (IoCs), as well as understand what malicious activities have occurred and how the adversary undertook those activities, including their tactics, techniques and procedures. 

Teams will have to use common industry tooling, like Cydarm's case management platform, to investigate, analyse, record, and report on their findings.

Besides just the technical aspects, teams will also be required to perform tasks that relate to managing the media, providing communications to senior leadership, and providing legal and privacy considerations in response to the incident. Teams will be evaluated on their performance and across the various tasks completed. 

"The rise in significant data breaches and ransomware attacks have raised public awareness about the importance of securing systems and data. However, according to AustCyber, well need an additional 17,000 cybersecurity workers by 2026 to shore up public and private defences," says Jill Taylor, Head of Marketing, Cydarm.
 
"While recent years have seen the launch of a string of certificates, diplomas and qualifications in higher education, providing access to real-world software and scenarios is a vital component of up-skilling current and potential employees. Cydarm is committed to supporting people and processes in security operations in ways that solve today's problems, and we're excited to support the Australian Women in Security Network and Retrospect Labs in building a diverse, highly skilled workforce."

Ryan Janosevic, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, Retrospect Labs, says the competition is a great initiative to help encourage more women to advance in cybersecurity careers.

"We are delighted to be able to run this competition for the second year in a row, applying our skills and knowledge to help the nation encourage more women to progress with their careers in cybersecurity and to give women a hands-on opportunity to experience incident response," he says.