Celebrating Cyber Security Excellence: Meet Penten’s Individual Finalists of the Australian Cyber Security Awards 2023

The inaugural Australian Cyber Security Awards recognises outstanding individuals and organisations that have made significant contributions to the field of cybersecurity, including defence, insurance and cloud service technology through to STEM, consultancy and ransomware protection. Meet our Individual Finalists: FEMALE CYBER SECURITY PROFESSIONAL OF THE YEAR FINALIST Abbie Smith Product Manager – Applied AI, Penten […]

The inaugural Australian Cyber Security Awards recognises outstanding individuals and organisations that have made significant contributions to the field of cybersecurity, including defence, insurance and cloud service technology through to STEM, consultancy and ransomware protection.

Meet our Individual Finalists:

FEMALE CYBER SECURITY PROFESSIONAL OF THE YEAR FINALIST
Abbie Smith
Product Manager – Applied AI, Penten

In 2022, Abbie delivered a major milestone in leading the company’s first commercialisation of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) product, called HoneyTrace.

We asked Abbie what business success is to her?
“Business success is not about making billions in profit, it’s about creating a capability or product that actually solves our customers’ problems. It’s about creating things that matter.
When a customer contacts us to say ‘hey, we’ve detected unauthorised activity on our network because we used what you built’ and that’s saved them from the consequences of an extensive data breach, then in my mind that’s the day we’ve succeeded.”

CYBER SECURITY RISING STAR FINALIST
Georgia Prout
Radio Frequency Engineer, Penten

In 2020, Georgia completed a 12-month internship at Penten as a systems engineer while completing her honours degree. She has contributed to a number of ground breaking projects for Penten including the demonstration model of the C4EDGE consortium’s high-assurance communications system for the Australian Defence Force.

What is business success to Georgia?
“Business success is making sure we’re getting things done when we say we’re going to get them done. From my experience, this is what keeps Penten clients coming back to us.
They know we’ll deliver what they want when they want it and that we’ll do it well.”

GOVERNMENT CYBER SECURITY PROFESSIONAL OF THE YEAR FINALIST
Gavin Longmuir
Security Architect, Penten

In February 2022, Gavin was approached by the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) to contribute as a subject matter expert to the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s Gateway Security Guidance Package. The new ACSC Guidance Package was launched in July 2022. Collectively, it captures and summarises over 200 years of combined gateway architecture experience from Gavin and his peers that has kept the Australian Government safe over the past 20 to 30 years.

Gavin’s thoughts on what successful cyber security means…
“It means that people can have an online presence and communicate with our increasingly online world in a secure and confident manner, We are protecting them from the criminals and state actors out there that may be abusing and using that information for other purposes. That is what people like myself spend a lot of effort doing.”

Our focus on innovation and success in secure mobility and applied AI has landed Penten as finalists for two awards for the Australian Cyber Security Group Awards: ENDPOINT SECURITY PROVIDER OF THE YEAR and THREAT DETECTION PRODUCT OF THE YEAR.

Thanks to Cyber Security Connect for hosting the Australian Cyber Security Awards 2023 and acknowledging and honouring cybersecurity excellence. Penten wishes Abbie, Georgia and Gavin the very best.