2 min read  | Cybersecurity

Lessons from Hacker Summer Camp

The Triskele Labs team has recently returned from Hacker Summer Camp 2022 in Las Vegas, where it was incredible to re-connect with leading cyber people from around the world after the COVID hiatus.

Hacker Summer Camp is a combination of conferences that normally occur each year, including ‘Black Hat’, ‘DEF CON’ and ‘B Sides’. These conferences are the meeting places for the world’s cyber community, and there are a lot of new and different things to learn.

One of the more significant changes we picked up on was the overall reduction in the use of the term ‘security’, with terminology changing to more accurately reflect the current trends and observations in the cyber world.

This year, the focus seems to have shifted more towards building cyber resilience and robustness, which means ensuring you have established a security posture that’s able to withstand a cyber-attack not if it happens, but when it happens, and ensuring you can respond appropriately.

In addition, resilience and robustness mean ensuring you have several layers of cyber defences in place in order to defend against a cyber-attack. That means if one layer fails, you have another, and another, to protect you.

Another thing we noticed is that nothing that was discussed in a lot of the presentations was particularly new. There hasn’t really been anything released recently that’s been ground-breaking, with lots of things getting back to basics, which is we think needed to happen. The trend over the last couple of years has been constantly trying new and different technologies, whether that’s zero trust or otherwise, but that trend seems to be correcting itself now.

With that said though, in one of the presentations we attended the panel was discussing complexity. As part of the presentation, they surveyed the audience, asking whether we foresee cyber getting to a point where it plateaus off, or whether we think the complexity will keep increasing infinitely. A large number of the audience chose the latter option, which we found particularly terrifying!

But it’s not surprising, and simply reaffirms our long-held position that keeping a watchful eye on your cybersecurity, ensuring your security posture is robust and resilient, regularly testing it, and rehearsing what happens when you get attacked, is critical to keeping your business functioning and your data secure.