Membership matters at AusCERT
The year that was 2020
It comes as no surprise to everyone that 2020 has been a particularly challenging year.
The year has seen the AusCERT team overcome a number of challenges as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Despite all of the disruptions, we are immensely proud of the way we have adapted to the changes and how we’ve carried out our business continuity plan.
Our top-three highlights:
Staying on top of all the challenges
Our member incident hotline continued to operate 24/7 during this entire period and our team has not only maintained a top-tier service to our members - we also proudly kept our fingers on the pulse and stayed on top of vulnerabilities and trending cyber security threats over the course of the year.
This resulted in effective and timely communication of remedial actions to our members, as well as the broader community!
Slack and member engagement
From the time we first launched our AusCERT member Slack workspace as a replacement of our IRC channel in May, we’ve witnessed an increased interaction from members. We now have over 265 members engaging actively in this space.
Additionally, we have pivoted all of our usual in-person member meet-ups to a series of online webinars.
You can catch up on these via our YouTube channel.
Delivering AusCERT2020 virtually
4 days of programming, 5 streams, over 80 hours of content, 2 live recording studios, close to 80 remote presenters, over 30 sponsor exhibitors and over 1000 delegate registrations.
We couldn’t have done this with your support!
Witnessing our delegates, speakers and colleagues rise to the occasion in the spirit of camaraderie
and innovation was an amazing experience.
You can also catch up on our conference content via our YouTube channel.
Behind the scenes at AusCERT2020
We Can Be Heroes
Quarter 1
We kicked off the year with a number of membership events in WA and VIC. The AusCERT team managed to catch up with members based in Perth and Melbourne respectively before the affects of the Covid-19 pandemic took a foothold in our country.
As the country began to transition its workforce into remote working, so did the AusCERT team.
We continued to deliver our membership and 24/7 incident management service through this period of uncertainty.
To support our members, we released a list of Covid-19 cyber threat observations, OSINT and safety recommendations via our blogsite here.
We also released a summary of our Quarter 1 report and stats which can now be found here.
Quarter 2
In Quarter 2, we made the call to pivot our annual conference into a virtual format - an entirely new frontier for our team!
In order to keep our members engaged amidst the turmoil the country was facing in the face of the pandemic, we launched our AusCERT members Slack space and saw an instant and positive response from our members.
Quarter 2 saw our team responding to several critical vulnerabilities. Examples include: Citrix (NetScaler), the “Let's Encrypt” CAA Code Bug, Palo Alto and F5 BIG IP.
On June 19th, Prime Minister Scott Morrison addressed the country with a major announcement regarding a "sophisticated state-based cyber-actor”.
The AusCERT team reacted very quickly through the following 'CnP' blog-post which was composed to assist members and the public. It remains one of our most read blogs in 2020.
A full summary of our Quarter 2 report and stats can be found here.
Quarter 3
In Quarter 3, we replaced our in-person member meet-up events through several webinar sessions.
Most importantly, we were able to successfully deliver our 19th annual cyber security conference virtually; this years' theme aptly being We Can be Heroes - thank you for being a hero and staying home.
Although we weren't able to engage in-person with our members, it was wonderful to see the community coming together through these virtual avenues.
Quarter 3 also saw the team working on a number of key external communications and public relations pieces, some of which were picked up by major news channels such as iTnews and ZDNet.
Of note, both of which took place in the month of August, are: the ProctorU data breach that involved contacting our members of the tertiary education sector, as well as the K7Maths data dump, with its sources later clarified through our blog.
A full summary of our Quarter 3 report and stats can be found here.
Quarter 4
In Quarter 4, we announced the theme for the 20th anniversary of our annual conference SOARing with Cyber a call to dust off your playbooks as we focus on improving efficiencies and making security a more self-operating function within our organisations.
The cyber security landscape is ever-changing, and AusCERT continues to be passionate about engaging our members to empower your people, capabilities and capacities.
More detailed information will be shared in the new year but here’s a sneak preview of what the team hopes to achieve in the new year:
1. Expand and enhance our delivery of threat intelligence.
2. Remain a trusted incident response partner, both locally and globally.
3. Consistent and useful engagement with our members.
Thank you for your support
In a year where the basic tenets of the working world changed, YOU (our members) helped us get through it!
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