‘Cybergeddon’ brings cyber security nightmare to life!

Dozens of delegates from across Lancashire have taken part in an immersive ‘escape room’ style seminar which highlighted the consequences of not taking cyber security seriously in a fun, immersive way.

Held at Training 2000’s Cyber Security Centre in Nelson, ‘Cybergeddon’ was designed to help business get to grips with how easy it is for a business to fall victim to an attack, by asking delegates to play a game – during which they learnt key information on combating diverse online threats impacting businesses from sole traders and SMEs to global corporations.

After a brief introduction, delegates were taken into four unique rooms, each with its own cyber security related theme, and asked to complete challenges and answer questions that can stop Cybergeddon – taken round the different activities by Training 2000’s ‘Hacker in Residence’ Jamie Woodruff.

The first room focused on social engineering, where delegates were shown how easy impersonation through in-person examples, where actors pretended to be from a well-known pizza delivery company and a health worker – whilst delegates were given examples of when businesses have had their data breached through this technique.

The second room saw various hacking techniques laid bare as the specific risks facing the relevant industries for each attendee – and how criminals may seek to exploit any potential weaknesses or vulnerabilities they might have – before identifying the visual risks and taking on a ‘crack the password’ challenge.

Finally, each delegate was given their own profile, put together with all the information publicly available online – to showcase how visible almost everyone is to anyone on the internet, even cyber criminals.

Sarah Green, cyber security business manager at Training 2000 said: “By creating a themed, escape room style interactive seminar, we wanted to help people understand the real danger cyber criminals pose to their businesses, and do this in a fun, engaging way which brought what can be sometimes seen a tech-jargon to life. Businesses can be shut down by even a relatively simple cyber-attack, we wanted to visualise the chaos this would cause before the hackers get any chance to do damage so vulnerabilities can be fixed before criminals identify them.