The adversarial mindset: How attackers think differently and why you should too

Adversaries think differently to defenders, leading companies to view themselves as completely secure, despite leaving massive security gaps for an attacker to exploit. This talk explores the adversarial mindset, including examples from red team engagements covering digital, social, and physical attacks; and further discusses how and why all defenders need to adopt the adversarial mindset to properly secure their assets.

Talk Content/Additional Details:

Overall this talk will explore the adversarial mindset, what it is, and why it is important. This will include examples of how adversaries breach companies in non traditional/unexpected means - which will use a mix of stories from red team engagements covering physical, digital, and social domains, and some real world examples.

It will discuss how adversaries approach attacking a company, and how defenders can use this same approach to analyse their security and identify gaps they might have missed previously. The examples should provide a really good understanding of why the adversarial mindset is so different to a defense mindset, and by extension why it is common for red team engagements to succeed and why some companies who seem to meet all compliance and do everything right still get breached. With a big focus on red team stories and real world examples I hope it would be very interesting and informative for all levels, covering for the c-level what sort of mindset is important when planning security strategy, down to both offensive and defensive analysts for how to approach an attack and analyse potential security weaknesses.