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Australian Signals Directorate ‘Women in Cyber’ program visits WA

Monday, 24 October 2022

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  • Tim Edwards, Paola Cerrato-D’Amico, Michelle Ellis, Donna Buckley and Soumita Kale

    Tim Edwards, Paola Cerrato-D’Amico, Michelle Ellis, Donna Buckley and Soumita Kale

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Due to the increasing cyber-attacks, military expansion in our region, growing coercive behaviour, ASD is investing in REDPICE – Resilience, Effects, Defence, Space, Intelligence, Cyber and Enablers. To maintain Australians strategic advantage in the upcoming decade, they are building. 1900 new analysts, technologists, corporate and enabling roles will be created across the Australia and the world. We were delighted to be part of this pilot program bringing cyber security to WA and in particular Geraldton where ASD has defensive capabilities.

Joining the Women in Cyber tour was John Curtin College's Donna Buckley. Donna shared her journey from mathematics teacher to becoming a Cyber Teacher. The group was able to spruik opportunities for women in cyber at Perth conferences and meetups. Panel presentations, seminars and cryptography workshops, were held to help educators understand the various skills and aptitudes needed to work in these fields. The casual conversations afterwards demonstrated a renewed interest in security and intelligence. #futurecareers #cybersecurityjobs

In addition to the women in cyber presentations, the online ASD Cyber EXP program was delivered to students. The experiences takes users through a day in the life of five cyber specialists working in the Australian Signals Directorate helping to secure the government’s information, services, and personnel. Tim Edwards, Vice President of Life Journey, helped to deliver these sessions to school groups where career information and activities were provided to help high students and in particular women to identify and match their personal attributes to the skills needed for such a position. More information can be found at:  https://asdcyberexp.com.au/

Along with the ASD team, Edith Cowan University student Soumita Kale and staff member Dr Michelle Ellis joined them for the regional Women in Cyber tour. The group travelled to Yamatji country where WA hosts ASD's Australian Defence Satellite Communications Station (built in 2011). Apart from a site tour, the team provided Professional Development to local and regional Geraldton teachers on cyber security awareness, cyber security, and cyber safety. With changes to the Australian Curriculum, Digital Literacy is playing an ever-increasing role in education. The ASD team along with Tim, Soumita, and Michelle ran several workshops focusing on information security, data encryption methods, digital footprints, and data breaches.

Finally, an afternoon Incident Response workshop was held by ECU Alumni and students with 120 high school students and their teachers. This was a great way to evaluate our effectiveness as presenters. The problem "A Telco has just announced that they have experienced a serious security breach, and that the bad actors are about to slowly leak private and confidential records of their clients - the ransom being paid in bitcoin". Knowing that personal information is valuable and hearing recent the recent media, the students set to work and came up with some innovative answers to the challenge.

  • Employ hackers to hack them back
  • Create a GoFund page to raise money to pay the ransom
  • Let them leak the data because then you get the data back
  • Crash Bitcoin
  • And of course…pay the ransom and get it over with

Happy birthday to ASD and thank you to the Women in Cyber team for a great opportunity. We hope to be back next year to a different part of Western Australia!

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