The Start Up Festival Malta 2022 took place between the 13th and 14th of October, which found huge success with over 800 attendees including start-ups, investors, stakeholders, as well as several students.
CyberFish is proud to be one of the start-ups that participated in the event. We were given the opportunity to facilitate one of our exercises based on a learning scenario playing out at a fictitious bank to Business Management students from St Martin's Institute of High Education, along with their teacher Charles Theuma.
During the scenario, the students took on the role of the Bank’s Incident Response Team. As a DDOS and malicious attack was enfolding, the students were required to address several technical, organizational, and professional challenges throughout the scenario.
The game was a learning process for the students, as they had to make crucial decisions and assessments over the course of the incident while the attack intensified across the Bank. Furthermore, they were required to manage the demands of the panicked clients, the public and media, financial regulators and data protection authorities, investigatory authorities, and international information-sharing networks, among other challenges.
Motivated by the team-based design, the students promptly took up to the challenge. Since the game can be played on both mobile and desktop, each student was able to participate in the game through their phones, with some having brought their laptops with them. Foreign students were also able to play the exercise in their own language, which can be seen in the image below. Overall, the exercise was inclusive for everyone to participate and enjoy.
The students learned a lot about cyber security incidents and the importance of having a plan in place so that everyone knows what they need to do when they detect different attacks on their networks.
Charles Theuma provides us with his closing thoughts after the exercise was finished in the video below.
During the second day of the festival, CyberFish’s CEO Berta Pappenheim was given the opportunity to present a pitch in front of an audience about what CyberFish is all about, and how we can help businesses and government teams to prepare to better handle business disruptions, by improving human resilience, which is a key element in crisis management that most of the time is overlooked.
Our mission is to help our clients prepare to better handle business disruptions, like cyber incidents. We do this by running incident simulation exercises with team members, analysing their responses and team dynamics under stress, and selecting the most suitable learning modules for them to make improvements.
