Crisis Management in the Age of Ransomware (21st September 2021)

So you’ve been hacked! Who’re you gonna call?

We are losing the war against cyber criminals, so it’s when not if you are hacked or for many, hacked again.

When you are burgled, the first two calls that you make are to the authorities (the police) and to your insurance company, but what about when you’re hacked?

People assume that if your privacy is compromised GDPR means that the authorities will take action. Don’t be so sure.

They also assume that cyber insurance works much like home and motor insurance and will cover all the costs when you’re hacked. Again, don’t be so sure.

And they also assume that the crisis management approach that you’d take for other crises, like fires or floods, will work with a cyber incident. Again NO!

Collectively we aren’t good at dealing with risk. We failed to appreciate credit risk ahead of the global financial crisis or health risk ahead of the pandemic.

The fastest-growing risk now is cybercrime and not only do most of us not appreciate the risks here, but we don’t have any idea of how to respond.

Organisations believing that ‘it’ll never happen to us’ or that ‘we’d probably be fine’, and that includes most of us, are in for a very nasty surprise!

About our speaker: Bill Mew, CEO The Crisis Team

As an entrepreneur, Bill is the CEO of the Crisis Team, an elite group of cyber incident specialists that supports clients when they have cyber incidents. While most incident response firms focus on just the technical issues, they also cover the legal, reputational and social ones as well. Formerly the global Comms. head for IBM Financial Services Sector, Big Blue’s largest and most profitable division, Bill led its crisis response to numerous incidents, even steering it through the financial crisis of 2008, when IBM’s banking customers were in real distress.

As a digital ethics campaigner, Bill focuses on striking the right balance between ‘meaningful protection’ (cybersecurity, privacy, digital ethics, etc) and ‘the maximization of economic and social value’ (AI, cloud, digital transformation, innovation, etc). He has collaborated on some of the largest privacy campaigns (such as the Schrems II case in the EU High Court that overturned Privacy Shield – the EU/US data-sharing treaty) and is an expert advisor to a number of law firms that are bringing large privacy cases in the UK

And as an opinion leader, Bill appears almost weekly on TV and Radio (BBC, RT, etc) commenting on a range of business and technology stories – more broadcast airtime than any other technologist in the UK. He also writes regularly for business, finance and technical publications and is a frequent public speaker, appearing on panels at Infosec Europe, Blackhat Europe, PrivSec Global and Think Cybersecurity for Government as well as chairing the whole of Cloud World Forum. He will soon be speaking at Digital Transformation Expo. Bill has also been named as the world’s top expert/influencer for data privacy and security in Onalytica’s 2021 “Who’s Who in Data Management”, and is ranked highly for cloud insights (Global Data listed him in the global cloud top ten while Onalytica had him at 35th for cloud – 2nd in EMEA).