Putting cybersecurity centre stage

09 Dec 2015 - 10:44:52 in Event
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Victoria University of Wellington is kick-starting initiatives for championing cybersecurity in New Zealand with an industry briefing featuring a guest appearance from a world-renowned cyber-crime expert.

Cybersecurity is seen as one of the greatest commercial threats to New Zealand. The Wellington event aims to raise awareness of the developing risks in the digital world and the costs of complacency, and will be attended by senior representatives from some of New Zealand’s largest companies.

Joining the briefing will be Kristopher Rush, a technical director in the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) division of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in the United States, and a leading expert in cybersecurity.

Before joining SEI, Mr Rush worked for the United States Department of State as a member of the Antiterrorism Assistance Program, where he developed and taught courses relating to terrorism and cyber-crime to foreign military and police.

His visit follows the announcement of a collaboration agreement between Victoria University, SEI and the New Zealand firm Total Risk to develop training, advice and protection services in cybersecurity.

“Most New Zealand businesses and many government agencies are lacking the individual expertise to protect themselves from the growing cyber danger,” says Geoff Todd, Managing Director of Viclink, the University’s commercialisation office.

“By arranging the industry briefing and bringing Kristopher over to New Zealand, we want to place cybersecurity front and centre in the minds of industry, and profile what we intend to do in this space to help.

“The collaboration with SEI means we will be working with the gold-standard organisation in the field of cybersecurity, and the relationship with Total Risk means we are aligned with one of only nine SEI certified training partners in the world, and the only one in New Zealand.

“Through this collaboration we aspire to be a leader in cybersecurity in the Asia-Pacific region,” says Geoff.

The SEI is a Federally Funded Research and Development Centre (FFRDC) at Carnegie Mellon University, specifically established by the United States Department of Defense to focus on software engineering and cybersecurity.

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