Infosecurity Europe 2023 Highlights: Women in Cybersecurity, Ontinue Customer Talks SOC Strategy and More

As Europe’s leading cybersecurity event, the Infosecurity Europe 2023 conference in London was a prime opportunity for hundreds of attendees to check out the Ontinue ION AI-powered managed extended detection and response (MXDR) service. Featuring live demos of our ION platform and access to our cybersecurity experts, Infosec attendees networked over innovations, trends, and keynote sessions, including the following insights reported by our team.

Women in Cybersecurity

Representing Ontinue at the Microsoft stand during Microsoft’s networking session, Breaking Barriers: Women’s Leadership and Success in Cybersecurity, Ontinue Head of Product Automation Meena Rajendran shared her experiences as a woman in cybersecurity.

Meena’s recounted her 13-year career in cybersecurity, which began with a SOC analyst role. She then worked her way up to a leadership position, overseeing threat hunting and incident response. Today, Meena heads up automation at Ontinue. “I have worked for companies that started SOCs from scratch and I’ve helped a startup get acquired,” Meena said, adding, “As a woman in cybersecurity, I have faced challenges — I have had to prove myself time and time again. However, I believe that the times are changing and that women are becoming more accepted in the field.

“I want to encourage other women to pursue careers in cybersecurity. Don’t let challenges scare you. Stand up for what you believe in and achieve your goals.”

Ontinue Customer Ottobock: Buy Your SOC

Providing his take on the debate over building vs. buying a SOC, Henning Christiansen, Chief Information Security Officer for Ottobock, presented his Strategy Talk, “SOC – Make or Buy?”

For Henning, the answer is clear: Buy a SOC, don’t build it. Based in Germany, Ottobock is a 100-year-old med-tech company, a global leader in innovative technology for wearable human bionics. Ottobock continually develops and perfects its technology to improve the lives of their users. As a result, the company faces a variety of cybersecurity challenges — including the cybersecurity skills shortage and threats to their IP — which made buying a SOC service the most logical choice.

Henning recommended that other CISOs in a similar position also consider buying, instead of building their own SOC. Henning said because Ottobock’s expertise isn’t as a cybersecurity company, they instead take the approach of relying on the cybersecurity experts.

Microsoft Teams-based Service Delivery

While some vendors at Infosec were still using portals — and introducing more of them — for service delivery, Ontinue takes a decidedly different and more intuitive approach with a unique Microsoft Teams-native service delivery model. By using Teams as the interface to ION, SecOps professionals — both at the customer’s organization and in our SOC — have a direct way to communicate, using the tools the customer already has. No new portals to navigate. No new tools to learn. Just highly effective collaboration.

Data Loss Prevention with Microsoft Purview

Compliance was a hot technical topic, featured in several sessions, both at the Microsoft stand and in several keynotes. It’s clear that insider threat and data leakage is starting to gain more momentum.

A Microsoft demo on Purview and data loss prevention showed that, with the proper document classification controls in place, Microsoft could block the extraction of the files themselves, and could also block any classified material from being sent externally when copied and pasted into Teams or email. Microsoft also covered the ability to alert in a different workflow based on management, or compliance needs, of sensitive data — which are typically unique from standard SOC operations of external threats.

Other Trending Topics

Managing and monitoring SaaS applications were also discussed during this year’s Infosec. While these have been popular subjects for a while, around the Shadow IT conversation that has been happening for quite some time.

A keynote covering the evolution of hacking and ransomware discussed emerging trends where AI is leveraged to essentially replace code — and bypass traditional security methodologies — using Fileless Polymorphic Malware. This attack vector is sure to be on everyone’s radar.