Special Guest Mark Leech

all right so we're starting off our morning with some special guests so again thank you for being here so early in the morning brightly um we're excited to have you all here in learning together um first I'd like to call it Mark leech Mark is currently the director of the Department of technology and Innovation for the City of Albuquerque welcome

[Applause] Mark well good morning everybody it's a great morning to see in Al working towards our common security goals together together love that the rain from last night and uh about New Mexico weather and uh particular thank you to uh Crow strike for this morning's early morning call so many thanks to everybody at bze for giving us all a chance to be part of this amazing event a big shout out to S Gabriel Chris sh and Christen give him a round of [Applause] applause so on behalf of the organizers the city of aler wants to welcome everybody to this year this is becoming one of the Region's top technology showcase events of the year so we know

we're in for an amazing time here over the next two days over 20 speakers more than 40 sessions workshops networking we're all going to be in for a total headrush of learning and fun definitely be something for everyone are we ready are ready so I think the fact that Al can host a cyber security event of this size import not only shows that we're growing as a city but also shows that Al has the technological chops and intelligent listeners to drive the conversation and make a difference in the way we protect our assets ourselves and our Lo ones and look at how the cyber security Community is growing in Al and the most exciting thing for me is seeing the diversity of

organizations representing more and more of the cyber security Spectrum we're not only seeing our established Partners maturing and growing up kind here but it's also great to see the newcomers and startups I'm totally stucked to see what new ideas these new people coming into our Al community and all these new organizations what they're going to bring to the table this is absolutely amazing time doing cyber security I'm so glad that we're all all part of this so the cyber security Community here in Al is moving fast and blazing the trail for what it means to be a vibrant inclusive industry and if you think about it it's an industry where everyone's voice matters and what you do

day in day out matters whether you're protecting homes family community our country it doesn't get much better than that in terms of a reason to get out of bed and come to work am I right okay I think some of us are still in bed here am I right so I thought this morning i' like to take a couple of minutes and share a couple of highlights from the past year I want to give you guys a challenge and I also want to do a call to action so it's been a year since we last Met A lot's going on in this year and I wanted to quickly sh low cost easy to use highlights but it make a big

difference for the city and the first one is a problem that we've been struggling with along with every other large organization and that's the critical window between infection and explosion form is getting smaller and smaller few years ago us have days to clean up we could reimage and bring people in and life is good great days but today you realistically talking what5 minutes for medz organization to go full through the key phes of identification contain that's a really small time so take the top exercis and been around for a long time and it's easy to dismiss them as long te or divorce in reality or get another exercise we have to go through we found with a little effort

and a little creativity we can transform these into a f training exercise so just like any other we try to improve response time and accuracy by rep repetition think about it in soccer Ork whatever whatever we do drills and the drills help us develop the muscle memory and the muscle memory means that we can respond fast we know what we need to do without thinking so I just need to give a quick quos here to Anthony my ISO uh because he's really B into this Fe dream of mine and 's done done a great job R way do this so now if you participate in one of our T exercises you can expect scenarios that are based actual historical events

and I'm not just talking kind of like reac these are real events the n and there events that we think would Reas happen to us in the future so we're practicing real situations we're also we also have multi- departmental participation so this isn't just about it it's an opportunity to share learn collaborate exchange ideas so other words you change it from kind of like being scor go wrong it's going to be the end of the world into something where we collaborate we're learn from each other and we never know where the next great idea comes from and so kind having that kind of like um infectious collaboration that was really cool to see so tabletops for us are now changing

like the traditional t top scenario and way you go into something that's closer to who don't we even have a complete Master ceremonies dungeon master depending on how how you think about it and his job right now is to referee and make sure that we're sticking to the script but also they'll throw in some complications a little bit of real time spice there so fin final part is uh you're taking your fun approach and one participant we have actually joined our exercise late and he didn't realize he was actually in a in a drill he thought he was in a real life situation okay now to be honest we didn't accidentally on purpose turn until much later and so he still

gets grief to that but again what we're trying to do is change changes from kind formal exercise into a kind more of a lightharted kind of approach so tabletops they cheap to run I've noticed the increas in collaboration and discussion after the events and the realization for me is that for many people tabletop exercises are the closest they get to a real cyber incident without it really more so we owe it to our teams to get them as close to wiing as possible by making our exercises into effective learning experiences we need our teams to be familiar with the steps so that when situations become real they're relaxed and don't sh that's the first one second one's uh

high low cost high impact Mak any difference and that's something called scam and it's a board that we take with us when we're about talking to presidents it's like a bingo Board of popular and emerging threats that we can mark off and use to start a conversation about cyber protection and learn what's happening in our community so none of us have any idea that cyber security could be so much fun and guess what our residents are learning about how to protect themselves better it's a simple tool you see cyber security doesn't always need to be about the big expensive or the most advanced AI out there it's all about making sure people know what to do and when to do

it and here's another thing that I realiz ALU is the 32nd largest city in the country and we're lucky in so far that we have police a staff cyber security team and a May that gets cyber security now I would certainly call us speci resources but there are communities that are smaller than us what about those the person who's a librarian and also the CIO in the spare time they certainly don't have the budget to go and buy the latest a threat detection software and they probably don't have time to go and do threat hunting on aular bases and it's also easy to skip thison pches from Microsoft because they know they have a customer who's waiting to

get their case worker engaged and that's the last email that I need to ask before I go home I need to pick up the kids and then I need to pick up the doctor from the V and that's J from HR again that's the third email she sent this month about Henry's leaving do in HR and and now she's asking about some kind of gift card and all I have to do is pick it the problem goes away and before we know it that's it the city funds are empty maybe 25 minutes later lock all technology so my challenge theide security communities simply this how do we do a better job to protect the small

communities from Bad ACC you see if we're not careful this is going to become a bigger acation than you're abil based on whether or not you can beat the Back Essential services in the worst case end up just being a function of your ability to play and here's where it really starts to become POS how many clicks on the fishing email will it take before we realize that the indirect delays and outages all add up to impact the vulnerable the people least likely to be able to buy their way out of the prop now we should be upset about this but I want to challenge you guys especially turn that upset that emotion into something constructive build the

best Solutions you can to protect oural communities okay so that's my one highlight my challenge so here's my call to action as the aloc cyber security Community let's look out for each other and let's rally around each other when someone has a me knows there's enough need to go around right now let's share the burm of security together let's also share and celebrate our community successes we're a strong Community we have a lot of smart people here a lot of good stuff is happening let's get the word out not only does Al have the best cyber security se but it's also the best place to live and work thanks for listening welcome to PID Albuquerque have a great two days