Isabella Riddell-Garner

5.50 AM

Recently my days have begun with me waking up at unacceptable hours (pre 6am) without the help of my alarm – which enables me to feed my YouTube addiction and scroll LinkedIn, Twitter and the news to understand the happenings in the world and the cyber specific world. I then panic to get ready fast enough to leave the house in a rush by 7am and catch the next train.

7.40 AM

I arrive in the office at 7:40, when the office is still pretty dormant. Here in Risk Advisory, we hot desk, but I’ve staked a claim to my desk with an array of snacks and a collection of under the desk shoes. From here I load up on shapes and seaweed from the kitchen (and stock up on my workmates favourite ones – we’re big fans of pizza and cheddar here).

Following my snack raid I start planning out my day. This includes collating a list (in a Bullet Journal kind of style) of everything that I need to do as told by my emails, calendar, and any loose thoughts that need to be actioned on my different engagements.

Within my team it is common to be working on a number of different engagements – which are just different pieces of work you are completing for different clients. Today I am focusing on two engagements, both with critical infrastructure providers. At the moment these kinds of engagements are some of the most exciting for me as I used to compete internationally in competitive robotics, and that background provides me a leg up in understanding the operational technology required. One of the engagements is to create a plan to uplift the cyber capability across the whole utility. The other engagement is a war game simulation that we have been planning for a couple of weeks and today we are running it with the client. For this we have designed a scenario to exercise their understanding and response capability. This kind of activity enables organisations to uplift their cyber incident response capability based on what could have been improved during the war game.

12.00 PM

In the Wellington Cyber team we have an informal 12 o’clock lunch club. This is basically where all the cyber team starts getting a bit twitchy and shoulder tap each other to see if it’s lunch time (which it always is unless there are client meetings!). I almost always bring my lunch rather than buy, but I’m becoming lazier as the days go by, so am frequently having healthy servings of sushi from one of the three sushi places on our block. Another new fave is the Mian Bar across the road for $8 noodles (don’t hold me to this price).

12.30 PM

I always imagined I would want to take an hour lunch everyday, and it would be leisurely but after about half an hour, I’m bored and want to do something. If I go out for lunch with friends then I’ll often spend ages out chatting, but not today! At 1:30 we are running the war game with the client, so I spend the next half hour brushing up the scenario and slides to make sure everything makes sense and is tidy. For me this includes clearing up any questions or concerns from my colleagues ensuring we have everything we will need for the four hours we will be away from our desks for. Clients often throw sidewinder questions, so we need to be prepared.

1.30 PM

At 1:30 we have each joined a call and shared our appropriate screens to communicate as required with the client. Due to the cyber threat landscape, and the nature of critical infrastructure, this simulation considered the risk of propagating ransomware between their corporate (or IT) and operational technology (or OT) environment (the corporate side is where you do day to day things, and operational  is where you interact with the infrastructure). The scenario provides injects with each slide to develop and add complexity in order to exercise a broad range of people and understanding.
At the end of the war game we leave time for the client to talk about what went well and what they could improve on based on their response.

After ending the client call we also talk about our experience of the war game, what went well, and how we can improve war games for future clients and how this scenario could be reused. We also plan the next steps.

4.50 PM

Once at my desk, I write down all the key actions we discussed and assign them to team members and distribute. In additional to this providing everyone visibility of what needs to be done and by who, it also enables people to add actions, or adjust them if required.

5.30 PM

Tonight the Cyber team has a team dinner to celebrate the promotions that became official early December. So we travel as a pack down Lambton Quay to Jasmin. With the team’s growth this year, we struggle to find places that can accommodate 20+ people, but spread across two circular tables, Jasmin does the job!

A highlight of going to Jasmin (or the similar Master Kong) is the ritual of someone eating the fish eyes. Today we had two fish, for four lucky people (I’m extremely lucky as a vegetarian to avoid this). Two of our new starters eagerly clinked spoons and downed the eyes.

We chat, have speeches, eat food, and overall have a great couple of hours out of the office!