IBM Guest Lecture

Date: 2021-11-03

Difficulty: N/A

Delivered By: Leigh from IBM

Overview

SUCSS is excited to welcome IBM to deliver a guest talk to the society on November 3rd! The title of the talk is "The Science of Countering Complex Threats" and will be delivered by Leigh, the manager of IBM's Security Innovation and Remediation Group (Europe). The full lecture abstract and Leigh's bio can be found below.

The guest lecture will replace our usual session for this week, but will still be held in Building 67, Room 1037 from 6-7pm. If you're not able to attend in-person, the talk will also be livestreamed on Discord and recorded.

Lecture Abstract

Maintaining an effective yet practical approach to cyber security is hard.

The topic is said to scale poorly with complexity and so as organisations and the threats they face become ever more complicated, we must consider what impact this has on our ability to design and implement appropriate defences. We talk of the risks associated with sophisticated, capable and motivated threat actors but given the inherent complexity of today's enterprises, what options have we to better equip ourselves with the tools required to counter them?

In this session we will discuss the role of the scientific method in cyber security - specifically how the problems of observability, data veracity and ground truth impinge on our ability to act and to take considered decisions. We will introduce the role of evidence-based practice and what a more rigorous and repeatable process has to offer when defending the contemporary enterprise. This will touch upon the field of network event processing, machine learning, digital forensics and host-based monitoring. The purpose of the session is for the audience to think about what the scientific method offers those planning, or already have, a career in information security.

Guest Bio

Leigh is a Computer Scientist and manager of the Security Innovation and Remediation Group (Europe) for IBM. Leigh co-leads a team whose role is to deliver creative, impactful solutions to cyber security challenges across the IBM enterprise. This ranges from first-of-a-kind prototyping to the implementation of critical security controls to mitigate emerging security risks. This encompasses a very broad range of topics and technical foci of interest - his current research and development efforts are in the application of graph computing to security intelligence, n-body simulations for computer networks and the role of serverless computing in autonomous security 'agents'.