Speaker: Nikki Peever, Director, Cyber Security, CAUDIT/AHECS
Could you please tell us your name, title and where you work?
Nikki Peever: Hi. I'm Nicky Peever. I'm the director of cybersecurity. At CAUDIT, we are a member owned not for profit. And we support the higher education and research sectors in Australasia.
As one of the founding members of CI-ISAC, what was the number one reason you chose to join?
Nikki Peever: the cyber threat landscape is continually evolving, and in order to protect ourselves and uplift the cyber maturity of our nation, we really need to start thinking differently and trying different approaches. When you look at the cyber criminals, they often work together. So you've got one organisation writing the code, another selling compromise credentials, another performing negotiations. It's really important that we band together, too. CI-ISAC offers a really unique, but absolutely necessary value proposition. It's really essential to further our cyber defences.
Why does CI-ISAC's mission of bringing people together to uplift the defences of Australia's CI resonate with you?
Nikki Peever: we're much better equipped when we work together. This is one of the really fantastic elements of what CAUDIT and AHECS provide across the higher education sector. So we have sector led communities of practice and the benefits within the cyber community include things like early threat intel, sharing of lessons, learned, information sharing and it's really apparent how this benefits our community. I really have no doubt that a similar level of collaboration across the entire C I sector would really provide extensive cyber uplift and absolutely benefit our cyber maturity and improve our cyber defences.
CI-ISAC aims to build context on threats to help our members make more informed decisions. How does this compare to traditional approaches?
Nikki Peever: Having context around threats helps to eradicate all of the white noise, and it enables our people to react quicker. This just really helps us to continually improve the way we do things. There's obvious cost benefits in terms of saving our people's time. So the resource costs. You know, instead of having hundreds of IOCs to analyse the applicability, our people have really specific contextual details, and it just makes much better use of their time.
Why is it important to you that other companies in your CI sector join the CI-ISAC community?
Nikki Peever: We all have the same problems. The cyber is quite tricky. You don't want to overshare or you don't want to disclose your vulnerabilities. It might lead to them being exploited. But we all have increasing demands and we've got finite resources. That just means we need to be smarter about how we're using our resources instead of everyone doing the same thing themselves. Once you know, why don't we all group together and do it together once and when we can share the information and reap the benefits in a very trusted space like what The CI-ISAC community offers?
CI-ISAC aims to build turn-key capabilities to support members - what would be your top priority for us to focus on?
Nikki Peever: top priority top priority. If you could stop all the cyber attacks and protect my data, that would be really cool. But seriously, I think we need to uplift together as a critical infrastructure community. We're only gonna be as good as our weakest link across the critical infrastructure network. So, you know, we we're dealing with supply chains, right? We're very dependent on other areas of critical infrastructure, potentially to operate. So that interaction and that uplift journey is really important that we're all on it together as a nation. ... and we're leaving no C I sector behind.
