Simon H.

I’m also excited to share that I’ll be giving a talk at the upcoming Australian Information Security Association (AISA) #cyberconference in Melbourne, entitled "Mental Health in Information Security - Its Time To Talk". Join me on Tuesday morning as we discuss the topic of poor Mental Health both in society and our industry, and some tips on what we can do to Detect, Identify, Respond and help a colleague Recover and Manage from a potential Mental Health issue. With some bonus tips for People… Show more

I’m also excited to share that I’ll be giving a talk at the upcoming Australian Information Security Association (AISA) #cyberconference in Melbourne, entitled "Mental Health in Information Security - Its Time To Talk". Join me on Tuesday morning as we discuss the topic of poor Mental Health both in society and our industry, and some tips on what we can do to Detect, Identify, Respond and help a colleague Recover and Manage from a potential Mental Health issue. With some bonus tips for People Managers and CISOs on their updated regulatory obligations. Hope to see you in Room 205 at 10:45am on Tuesday Show less

Mental health is becoming one of the most significant issues in our society, and the information security industry is no exception. Our industry often attracts people with certain personality traits or attributes, including technical, analytical, obsessive, dedicated, perfectionist, curious, dogmatic, unempathetic. This can lead to us being labelled nerds and geeks, which are used to dehumanise us by others.

But we are all human. We work in high stressed environments and pressures are… Show more

Mental health is becoming one of the most significant issues in our society, and the information security industry is no exception. Our industry often attracts people with certain personality traits or attributes, including technical, analytical, obsessive, dedicated, perfectionist, curious, dogmatic, unempathetic. This can lead to us being labelled nerds and geeks, which are used to dehumanise us by others.

But we are all human. We work in high stressed environments and pressures are placed upon us by ourselves, colleagues and our employers to perform with unrealistic budgets, team members and timeframes. This can be unhealthy at best, but downright dangerous at worst. Mix this with the regular ups and downs we all experience in life and it is no wonder that many people in our industry suffer from poor mental health.

In this session, will shed light on this taboo topic to raise awareness and help end the stigma that is often attached to conditions such as anxiety, depression, and bipolar. We will use a combination of medical facts and our personal stories to humanise a topic that is still treated in a very inhumane way.

We will also present and discuss some of the:

most common mental health conditions
early warning signs that someone is not okay
some basic approaches you can take when dealing with someone who is not okay
resources available to help you and your organisation help people that are suffering from poor mental health
Our objective is to have a conversation about how we can identify, support and help each other when our mental health is compromised and to determine how we can practically support each other at the community level. Show less

A talk given at ComfyCon's Summer 2020 Online Conference about Mental Health in the Workplace, focusing on the Information Security Industry. Recording Link: (to be added)

The Consulting, Digital, Information and Technology industries traditionally have attracted a certain “type” of person. Detail-oriented, technically very literate, perfectionist, with stereotypical character traits that give us (un)flattering labels such as nerds and geeks and the reputation of not being “people” people. However, all of us are people. And people go through ups and downs in their lives, and suffer poor mental health. Its normal – anxiety, depression… Show more

The Consulting, Digital, Information and Technology industries traditionally have attracted a certain “type” of person. Detail-oriented, technically very literate, perfectionist, with stereotypical character traits that give us (un)flattering labels such as nerds and geeks and the reputation of not being “people” people. However, all of us are people. And people go through ups and downs in their lives, and suffer poor mental health. Its normal – anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, right up to more serious areas of severe mental illness such as psychosis, substance addiction,
attempted and actual suicide.

Just like physical health, poor mental health is a disabling condition that affects our own quality of life, as well as of those around us. Men tend to suffer at younger ages, self-medicate with alcohol and drugs and cause themselves permanent disability or death. However further research in this area seems to indicate this affects Women a lot more from the early 40s … and the suffering is longer right through to the end of natural life. Women don’t appear to take the easy way out so suffer long-term with this.

We need to have a conversation within the Information Security Industry of how we can identify, support and help each other through these ups and downs; but also identify what we can practically do to support each other at the community level. Show less

Presented by: @pingudownunder
Simon will present his thoughts on the current state of mental health within the cyber security industry, and will touch on how we can support each other.

Presentation given at CrikeyCon 2019 (www.crikeycon.com) on Mental Health Awareness and the need to support each other better within the local Information Security community. Video to follow.

Presentation given at AISA's BrisSec 2019 (www.aisa.org.au) on Mental Health Awareness and the need to support each other better within the local Information Security community.

A presentation given to the AISA National Conference in Melbourne; calling upon members of the Information Security and IT Sectors to look after each other better in the area of Mental Health.

This paper gives a comprehensive overview of the findings and results from the OSMOS (IST-1999-10491) project. OSMOS aims to highlight and go some way to meeting the needs of the industry by providing a set of tools, models, APIs and techniques to support the construction “Virtual Enterprise” (VE). Key to the OSMOS approach is that the tools will allow companies (especially SMEs) to partake in a project-based VE quickly and at a low entry-level. Through a combination of IDEF0 and UML modelling,… Show more

This paper gives a comprehensive overview of the findings and results from the OSMOS (IST-1999-10491) project. OSMOS aims to highlight and go some way to meeting the needs of the industry by providing a set of tools, models, APIs and techniques to support the construction “Virtual Enterprise” (VE). Key to the OSMOS approach is that the tools will allow companies (especially SMEs) to partake in a project-based VE quickly and at a low entry-level. Through a combination of IDEF0 and UML modelling, within an iterative and incremental project methodology, the OSMOS consortium has elaborated a generic process model for the set-up and structuring of the construction Virtual Enterprise, which has formed the basis for the technical implementation of the tools and API. The tools, once designed, built, and made available for testing, have been evaluated within construction based case scenarios by end-users, and subsequently refined and re-tested. The resultant solution being offered through the OSMOS approach will involve some potential process changes within the companies wishing to take part in the VE, and the project aims to provide a proposed migration path to this end. Show less

A project to enable health care professionals (GPs, practice nurses and diabetes nurse specialists) to access, via the Internet, confidential patient data held on a secondary care (hospital) diabetes information system, has been implemented. We describe the application that we chose to distribute (a diabetes register); the security mechanisms we used to protect the data (a public key infrastructure with strong encryption and digitally signed messages, plus a firewall); the reasons for the… Show more

A project to enable health care professionals (GPs, practice nurses and diabetes nurse specialists) to access, via the Internet, confidential patient data held on a secondary care (hospital) diabetes information system, has been implemented. We describe the application that we chose to distribute (a diabetes register); the security mechanisms we used to protect the data (a public key infrastructure with strong encryption and digitally signed messages, plus a firewall); the reasons for the implementation decisions we made; the validation testing that we performed and the preliminary results of the pilot implementation. Show less