In the opening keynote at BSides Leeds head of cybersecurity research Daniel Cuthbert said that we are “in the best industry in the world” and, having spent 27 years doing cybersecurity, he has seen that it is the “misfits and weirdos who are doing amazing things.”
Cuthbert said that we are “going through interesting times” in what we are calling the 'fourth industrial revolution,' “and it is good as it is about cyber” and there has been a fundamental change in how we relate and talk.
Pointing to the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds, he explained that if you look at the most powerful people in the world, they are people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and “people in technology impact how we work.”
Cuthbert also pointed out that law makers and politicians are getting more involved in cybersecurity issues, as once 'Spot the Fed' was played at DEFCON, distinguishable by their smart-casual clothing, eventually “they saw the need to get people like us back in the fold.”
This was made further evident by the likes of San Bernadino district attorney Michael Ramos using the term “lying dormant cyber-pathogen” after the shooting and locked iPhone debate, and Cuthbert also pointed at the FBI now having a dedicated page for cyber-criminals, which was mostly made of foreign nationals.
“Don’t stop what you’re doing; we do amazing stuff and people watch what we do,” he said.