On Thursday, 19th September, we proudly hosted the Nebula 2024 September Summit, welcoming over 50 delegates for an engaging day centered on technology. Attendees were eager to tackle the latest cyber threats while gaining valuable insights into the modern workplace. They explored pragmatic approaches to harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) for significant productivity enhancements. The event was beautifully complemented by the stunning backdrop of the last Concorde to fly, which made its final journey to Bristol Aerospace in October 2003, adding a touch of history to the occasion.
A morning of cyber security
We schedule our annual summits between 10 am and 3 pm to ensure everyone can make the most of the day. After some pre-presentation caffeine and networking, delegates settled into the lecture theatre of the Aerospace Museum for the first of our expert talks. Following the usual housekeeping announcements – along with an unusual extreme heat warning regarding the specially commissioned Reaper Chilli Sauce tucked into the goody bags – Alex Popham, Senior Security Specialist at Microsoft, began his presentation on Microsoft security.
Alex kicked off the session with some eye-opening (and slightly alarming) statistics:
· That if cybercrime were a national economy, it would be the third largest in the world at $8T, behind only China and the USA.
· The threat actors tracked by Microsoft rose more than 50% from 200 in 2022 to more than 300 in 2023.
· And over the same period of 2022-2023, the number of password attacks per month rose tenfold from 3B to 30B.
The landscape of defence is undeniably becoming more complex! Microsoft boasts unparalleled insight into attacker behaviours, with access to a remarkable 78 trillion synthesised signals each day. This exceptional position enables them to develop robust defences, and Alex elaborated on the capabilities of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. This tool excels at detecting and investigating advanced persistent attacks that bypass outer defences, utilising correlated behavioural alerts and analysing over six months of data to respond with a comprehensive set of actions.
Next, we welcomed Phil McGowan, a cybersecurity expert from Huntress, another valued technology partner:
Phil walked us through various endpoint threat detection techniques employed by Huntress, such as identifying malicious process behaviour, persistent footholds, ransomware canaries, open port detection, and credential reports. One particularly striking example he shared involved a man-in-the-middle attack, which can circumvent two-factor authentication (2FA). By stealing session tokens, hackers can exploit vulnerabilities, even among savvy users, tricking them into divulging their 2FA codes. This method can potentially compromise any software, from Microsoft applications to Instagram.
Before we broke for lunch, our very own Chris Pottrell regaled us with an entertaining history of spam emails, representing another of our technology partners, MESH. He took us on a journey from the infamous ILOVEYOU worm in 2000 to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, as well as the WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017 and the SolarWinds breach in 2020.
An afternoon of productivity
After the opportunity for more networking and a delicious lunch under Concorde itself, the focus for the afternoon was on productivity.
First up was the concept of the Modern Workplace. An environment which allows employees to work securely, from anywhere, at any time and on any device.
Microsoft 365 is powerful enough to enable this but also deliver key benefits to organisations, including vendor licence cost consolidation, reduced total cost of risk, IT administration and deployment savings, physical and travel cost displacement, savings on automation and process improvements and transforming capital expenditure to operational expenditure delivering cashflow advantages and increased flexibility. Putting some of the advantages into numbers it was suggested that businesses could benefit from one hour per week, per employee in improved productivity, approx. £700 in reduced travelling costs per employee and about £23 in avoided monthly technology costs per user.
The penultimate part of the day was focused on AI, and what about this for a statistic:
To reach 100 million users…
It took mobile phones 16 years,
It took the Internet seven years,
It took Facebook four and a half years,
It took ChatGPT three months.
The talk focused on a demonstration of how Microsoft Copilot could radically quicken the way we work, creating a multi-slide PowerPoint presentation (on Concorde, of course!) in minutes and drawing key information from a long and complex Teams discussion. It is not perfect, but it can often get you to 80% through a job very quickly, leaving your human touch to refine it.
It was all quite the eye-opener to the uninitiated.
Our 2024-2025 charity – Community of Purpose
The final part of the day was led by Amy Kington from our charity partner Community of Purpose. In an engaging talk, she told us about the wonderful work this charity does, supporting children with meals and activities during the school holidays through their Break Free project. We had been collecting money on the day via a charity raffle, where the prize was none other than a stunning Lego Concorde set, ready to be built. We can’t tell you how tempted we had been to tear it open and build it ourselves. One lucky winner took it away as the draw was made and after that everyone was free to explore the (real) Concorde and the rest of the museum as they went their separate ways.
If you or your company need a charity to sponsor and/or volunteer for going into 2025, Community of Purpose are a fantastic choice. Check out their website here to find out more.
Technology events at Nebula
At Nebula IT, putting on such in-depth technology events is one of the ways we live our mission: “To fuel our community with intelligent technology solutions”.
Are you eager to discover when our next event is scheduled, or do you want to learn more about our services for your SME or charity? If so, please get in touch by following this link to book a discovery call.
We would be thrilled to help you ensure your organisations safety and support your success with top-notch IT assistance and innovative technological solutions.