Meet cyber ambassador Andrew Stace

Andrew Stace is the owner and founder of ENA Digital in the NSW regional city of Newcastle. He is also the technical director of tele-health start-up Teledermatologist/Telehealth Specialists Australia. He is one of NSWCSIN’s newest cyber ambassadors, a successful business person and active member of the Hunter Region’s burgeoning cyber security scene.

“My clients come to me for my solutions and implementations to their web asset problems. Whether it’s maintaining a Windows or Linux server, or understanding new features and creating updates for existing web systems or websites, or how to understand their digital marketing data and come up with a strategy for their digital presence.

“My work requires me to consider questions like, how are we storing private information, where is it stored, how is it accessed? How is our infrastructure configured to be secure or resilient to attacks or incidents? What are the types of attacks or incidents that we are anticipating, how do we capture data on these types of incidents and how do we respond to these types of incidents?”

Getting started in cyber

As a teenager, Andrew wanted to be a hacker. “During years 11 and 12 I did a TVET IT Networking course as an elective, which was the equivalent of a Certificate 2. Learning more specifically about computer networks seemed like a good path into a hacker’s set of knowledge. This was also where I came to realise that I wanted to go to TAFE after year 12 and continue on to a Cert 4 and then Diploma of IT Networking.”

Andrew found he wanted to understand technology at a deeper more fundamental level and went to university as a mature age student, undertaking a Bachelor of Information Technology at the University of Newcastle, majoring in software development and applications.

“As I studied at university I continued to work in tech, moving on from my technical support / systems administration / IT manager role and heading more towards creating & marketing website.”

As I was studying and working with web tech, I became very interested in how information and bad information was informing business decision making. This led me (in 2014 – pre “fake news”) to write my major essay on ‘information validity on the web’ with a focus on exploring the categories of disinformation, misinformation and information.”

Being creative in a cyber career

“Over my career and studies I’ve always jumped at the opportunity to work in a more cyber security oriented role, whether it was responding to a defaced website and figuring out the attack vector, or looking at the disaster recovery / mitigation options of the infrastructure and business processes.”

I can’t say that I still aspire to be a “hacker”, I enjoy creating things too much. Now I see simply myself as someone always trying to develop my own and raise the consciousness of the responsibilities inherent in digital, especially web systems, as well as exploring ways to create new positive opportunities with web systems.”