15th e-Crime & Cybersecurity mid-year summit, London UK

The 15th e-Crime & Cybersecurity Mid-Year Summit took place on October 19, 2023 at Park Plaza Victoria London, UK. Ground Labs had the privilege to attend the event alongside our partner HANDD.

The event, hosted by AKJ Associates, delivered a wide-ranging agenda covering the cybersecurity hot topics of the moment, from cyber-skills shortages and cloud security concerns to data security risk and global crises.

While AI is grabbing the headlines, the event focused on the day-to-day responsibilities of the cybersecurity function and its role in privacy and national security, as well as preventing and managing cyber-attacks and security incidents.

Ground Labs’ co-founder and chief evangelist, Stephen Cavey, presented an education seminar explaining that data breaches commonly occur impacting data organizations didn’t know they were storing.

He explained that, while data awareness — knowing the data you have, where it resides and how it is used — is crucial to data security, the manual approaches used by a majority of organizations identify data based on data flow diagrams and process flows are flawed. An evidence-based approach to data discovery enables businesses to identify data stores omitted in manual methods; the unknown unknown data stores created outside these designed processes and data flows.

Among the many notable sessions of the day, Cavey joined an expert panel to discuss some of the current challenges faced by CISOs and cybersecurity teams. In a lively debate, the panel agreed that the expectations of the CISO role today are often not realistic — arguably contributing to high rates of burnout among senior professionals.

Meanwhile, organizations are battling the challenges and risks of managing data in a cloud-first, remote-worker environment where boundaries of control become blurred. This is driving an evolution in third party assurance programs, with more organizations invoking more rigorous demands on their supply chain.

Finally, a live social-engineering demonstration highlighted the vulnerability of individuals when faced with a targeted campaign to capture sensitive information. Sobering to witness and a wake-up call to businesses that cybersecurity training remains as vital and relevant as ever.

To find out how evidence-based discovery can enhance your data security capability, download your free copy of our Tech Guide to Data Discovery today