Interview Magda Chelly (Responsible Cyber) and Reuben Sinclair (Micro Focus)
The First CTF For Girls in Singapore, A WoSEC Initiative
Q1. First of all, could you provide a short overview of Microfocus and the company’s work and objectives? Which services and products do you provide and what are the target groups?
Microfocus is a British software engineering company with four main portfolios, Security, Risk & Governance, Enterprise Dev Ops, Hybrid IT Management and Predictive Analytics. So focusing on the security portfolio — we help our customers with Breach Defence and Privacy. Our solutions cover all phases of the NIST Cyber Security framework at depth but at a high level we help in three main areas. Applications — we help make applications better and more secure through our class leading Fortify application security testing solution. In Identity Management, we help customers secure; staff, customer and device identities with our NetIQ solutions making authentication and authorization, smoother faster and more secure. And thirdly we talk about data where we help in two ways, we identify the sensitive and personal information that matters most through e-discovery tools and we protect that data with encryption solutions protecting data at rest or in transit with Voltage Secure Data.
- The central subject of the CTF will be showcasing women talent in a technical field. What is your understanding of this approach? And why should organisations pursue this initiative ?
Capture the Flag is essentially a competitive technical challenge involving classic attack/defend or red team/blue team scenarios. This makes it not only accessible, fun and engaging but also it does actually represent real world challenges that we face in cyber security. If we can better understand, at first hand, the vulnerabilities in systems in order to defeat and attack them then we can use that same learning to build more secure applications at the start, making them secure by design and also understand how to better defend and protect them.
- In many organizations cybersecurity diversity is seen as a challenging area. What do you think reality is like? Where do you think the real challenges are?
Well it’s a fact that in cyber security we have both a gender gap and a skills gaps, in fact we are facing a critical global skills shortage of 1.8million roles by 2022. In this region, there is a shortfall of between 2000 to 3500 resources over the next three years in Singapore. Together, we need to address that gap as an industry by using all of the available resource pool and to me, it just makes sense that in bridging the gender gap, we help address the overall skills gap. We are also competing with other disciplines from the emerging graduate talent pool, so we have to evangelize to female graduates that cyber security is engaging, exciting and rewarding and that they have a significant contribution to make.
By Magda Chelly:
Former Chief Security Officer | Author & Keynote Speaker | IFSEC Global Top 20 Cybersecurity Influencer | Entrepreneur | PhD, S-CISO, CISSP, Cert SCI (General Insurance)
Find out on magda-on-cyber.com
Awards
- The IFSEC Global influencers in security and fire 2021
- Top Women in Security Asean Region 2021 Awards https://www.asiapacificsecuritymagazine.com/winners-and-judges-of-the-top-women-in-security-asean-region-2021-awards/
Social Media Accounts
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/m49D4ch3lly
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/m49d4ch3ly
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/m49d4ch3lly
