Hello everyone, and welcome to your July update!
We hope you're all safe and healthy. We're finally halfway through 2020, which is a welcome milestone for what's been a really challenging year so far.
Firstly, in case you missed it, Sophia won Cybersecurity Student of the Year at the SC Awards Europe 2020! An absolutely fantastic achievement and really well-deserved - we're incredibly proud of her and we know she'll keep slaying everything she sets her sights on.
A couple of weeks ago Morgan virtually attended the 2020 AWS Summit for a bit of an update on all things AWS and recent releases. The talks are available online here - you just need to retroactively register for the event to access them. There are 55 talk videos available across 11 tracks - the talks are split out depending on discipline and rated according to difficulty level, so you can choose beginner or more advanced talks, depending what skill level you're currently at.
Maze group have had a busy first half of the year, with heavily publicised ransomware attacks against the likes of IT Services firms Cognizant and Conduent, Xerox, defence sector contract firm Westech International, and others. Interestingly, there's a two-pronged approach to an attack with Maze; you pay for the decryption key to recover your data, and you also pay to stop the attackers from publicly releasing the data they stole prior to encryption.
In other news this month, BSides Manchester has unfortunately been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They're planning to come back in 2021, and we're absolutely sure it'll be worth the wait. If you're like us, and struggling a little with missing conferences, there are a few events that have decided to go virtual. BSides Newcastle is one of these, and the CFP is open until the end of August if you'd like to submit.
On a happier note, we've been trying out new social media platforms, and we now have a super cute Instagram and a YouTube channel! At the moment our YouTube is an archive of Sophia's weekly Hack the Box streams (she streams over on Twitch at 8pm on a Wednesday) and a growing playlist dedicated to each of our conference talks. We're really excited to have roughly a 40:60 ratio of female to male followers on Instagram at the moment, and we hope we can keep engaging women outside the security community with accessible content, too.
Speaking of content - we have some really fun posts coming up soon, but as always we'd love any constructive feedback or suggestions you have - just drop us a line on one of our socials (linked at the bottom of this newsletter) if you have any ideas.
Lastly, in case you missed any of these, linked below are a handful of our most recent posts!
Lots of love,
The Queens xxx
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