Safer Internet Day, which we celebrated earlier this week, serves as a crucial reminder of the collective responsibility that we all share in maintaining a secure and resilient online environment. In an era where cyber threats are constantly evolving, protecting digital spaces is not a solo effort - but a collaborative mission.
This is especially true in network defence, where teamwork plays a vital role in identifying, mitigating and preventing cyber threats. By working together - whether as security professionals, organisations, or everyday internet users - we can build a safer and more secure internet for everyone.
Our cyber division has been working on this recently, helping a team to harness individual skills to deliver effectively. In this particular example, it was to win at international competition, using the entire team, their knowledge, skills and behaviours. This can be done by…
Writing and exercising your cyber incident response plans
Ensuring effective communication
Knowing your assigned roles and responsibilities
Knowing individuals’ strengths and weaknesses
Promoting the sharing of subject matter expert (SME) knowledge to create a safer environment
Example: The UK Cyber Team Selection, in partnership with SANS. Here’s what the team did...
1. Assessment – We designed a soft skills assessment rubric, which is a predefined criteria across the soft skills we identified as most important for team selection: communication, collaboration, commitment, problem solving and confidence.
We managed a team of 30 assessors from across industry at the live final, enabling them to mark the scores of 200 players.
2. Analysis – We fed both quantitative and qualitative data from the 200 players into our data analysis system, allowing us to rank, filter and visually represent players and teams based on their soft skills performance.
3. Selection – Our cyber division represented Inzpire at a selection panel with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and SANS, to present an overview of the soft skills scores for potential UK Cyber Team members alongside their technical scores from three rounds of Capture the Flag events with SANS.
4. Training – Delivered by Don, our human factors and socio-behavioural SME, and our cyber experts Mac and Clare, topics include: the importance of psychological safety, communication, trust, and how to manage stress and pressure.
5. De-Brief – We provided an innovative and graphical soft skills de-brief, allowing opportunities for growth to help those not selected to come back next year, and for those selected to focus their training and development as part of the UK Cyber Team.
Read more about our sponsorship of the SANS UK Cyber Team Competition here.
