13Fields

Last night (Thursday 22nd), we were extremely proud to sponsor a table and attend the CyberFirst Wales Girls CTF Competition Regional Recognition Dinner at the ICC Wales, Newport. The top-10 teams from schools across Wales all came together to celebrate and be celebrated, with industry sponsors for the individual tables and for the whole event. Palo Alto ran a live CTF for the girls to do too, and seeing them tackle these problems with resilience and determination was just brilliant. So many of the schools and teams competing have minimal opportunity to teach the sort of skills required for CTFs- it's quite a distance from a lot of the accessible and available ICT teaching pre-GCSE- and all the girls are largely or entirely self-taught. They were fantastic. Being able to sit with them and discuss our experiences of Cyber as technology, but also socially- travel, seeing new places, getting involved in interesting activities, blue team work and IR work, and all the moving parts that make up "Cyber" beyond the stereotypes- was an amazing, and we hope inspiring, opportunity for us. There was no better way for us at 13Fields to sign off on the last 5 years than to support the future like this. We're taking a little break for a while now to focus on some other things; looking back to why we started 13Fields, what we were hoping we could help achieve socially as a small start-up doing consultancy services in this space and looking to give-back and pay-forward whenever we could, then I think we can look back at this event, our community involvement in BSides and others, our work with universities, and our consistent support for other Women in Tech and Women in Cyber events, and think we've probably done ok. :)

Today we donated some of our older decom’d laptops to a local charity that works within the community and with young people using circus and performance as a training ground for a career in arts. “Fields Good” is our pun-tastic take on giving back, and it’s a great feeling to be able to support other people and organisations with tech that’s beyond its useful life for us, but still more than useful for others 💚

Finishing the year as we started it, with a BSides! This time London, and we’re sponsoring the car hacking village. Definitely worth having a look at live interjection in instrument clusters… If you’re around, drop us a message, grab us in the coffee queue, come say hi. :)