It’s Just Plain Cyber is an engaging and informative cybersecurity podcast hosted by Terry German and Steve Arnold. The hosts aim to demystify the world of cybersecurity and make it accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical background.
Terry, with a vast 18 years of experience in cybersecurity, shares his passion for cybersecurity and the need to bridge the gap between complex technical concepts and everyday understanding. His shift from IT to information security was driven by a desire to have a better work-life balance and to spend more time with his family.
Steve, who works in cybersecurity recruitment, want to engage with people and share knowledge in a relatable manner. Steve wants to bridge the gap between technical jargon and everyday understanding.
It’s Just Plain Cyber is to address real-world scenarios and common cybersecurity issues that affect everyone. This podcast is not just for tech geeks; it’s for everyone, from those who are just getting started in the field to those looking to understand how cybersecurity impacts their daily lives.
Terry and Steve plan to cover a wide range of topics, including data protection, GDPR, careers in cybersecurity, and real-life stories from their extensive experience.
Let me tell you a little about myself. Now I’m not going to copy and paste my CV/Resume as I wouldn’t want you to fall asleep even before you hear the podcast.
I started my passion of Cyber/Information Security whilst working in I.T which I started way back in 1994. Bored and fed-up of working 24/7, not weekends off and being on-call, I had a young family at the time and not seeing them a lot made me feel really low. I was given the opportunity to move into the security team at the company I worked at in 2000. From there my love of security grew and grew along with my career and of course my knowledge. All this has put me in the great position I’m today as the Group Head of Information Security at my current company.
What about outside of security Terry? Well, its hard to not thinking about security in our everyday life but I try my best. I have the same love for security as I do for my football team Liverpool Football Club. I’m season ticket holder and go to most of the home games I can get to, which is sometimes hard when you have a loving family to take care of. I play a lot of golf and enjoy leaving the real world and playing on my Xbox, yes, even adult play computer games.
Steve joined Via Resource two years ago, having spent the previous 4 years working solely in the Information/Cyber Security sector recruiting roles such as Information Security Manager, Security Architect, Security Engineers and Security Analysts.
Steve now solely focuses on GRC positions for Via Resource and has experience managing the end-to-end recruitment process for organisations nationwide with roles covering all facets of Governance, Risk & Compliance both contract and permanent.
As well as this Steve gained a National Diploma Level 2 and NVQ Level 3 in Recruitment and is CertRP certified.
Terry 00:06
Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Welcome to. It’s just plain cyber. I’m your host, Terry. My co host, Steve.
Terry 00:15 Say hello, Steve.
Steve 00:16
How you doing, guys? You’re okay?
Terry 00:18
Good. This is our first podcast, our first episode. I hope you enjoy the rest of the episodes and you take a lot of information and understand the passion that me and Steve have.
Steve 00:35
Yeah, exactly. Thanks for tuning in, guys. Terry and I have been talking for a little while about putting this together. I think the format sounds like it should be something that’s pretty open to everybody. I guess the first and foremost thing is probably explain who we are. Terry, you kind of kick things off, so I’ll let you explain to everybody who you are, and then once you’ve done that, I’ll give everyone a little bit of background on myself as well.
Terry 00:58
Yeah. Okay. So I’ve been in It and Information Security, or Cybersecurity we’ll explain the difference between Cybersecurity and information Security in a future episode. But I’ve been in it for. Oh, coming up to 1617 years first. And then I moved into Information Security. The reason I moved into information Security was because I was sick and tired of working 24/7 on call, having no weekends, having a young family and not being able to see them.
Terry 01:34
So I moved into security, and I’ve been in security about 18 years, something like that, 1819 years. And me and Steve first met when Steve contacted me about a job. And we built up a good relationship. Then we’ve been friends for the last, what, two or three years.
Steve 01:53
Steve, would you say it’s been a little while now.
Terry 01:56
Yeah, we had to look back. We had to look back and see how long it was. And it was a long time. Yeah. So that’s a bit about myself, health. I’m now in a position of Group, head of Information Security for a pharmaceutical company, but that’s a little bit about me. And again, I’ll introduce you to myself a little bit more as we go along in future episodes.
Terry 02:16
But over to you, Steve.
Steve 02:18
Yeah, sure. I think, as you alluded to there, I do, for my sins, work in recruitment. Did it? Of course my phone would ring.
Terry 02:28
Yeah, of course. It’s very important that’s somebody who wants a job, Steve.
Steve 02:33
Well, there we go. That couldn’t have been timed any better, could it? We’ll leave that in the edit, actually. But, yeah, as Terry alluded to, there would have been a number of years going out, actually. I contacted Terry about a position because he was on the market, kind of kept in contact ever since then. Him and I had a couple of chats recently. I saw that he was looking to launch a podcast.
Steve 02:58
I had previously done a bunch of webinars. I was looking to get back into that because I love talking to people, letting people talk and learning and also putting things out on the internet, because I used to previously run the radio. I’ve done various things around social media, stuff like that. So I just enjoy that side of things now, working as a senior consultant for a company called Viaresource, focusing very much in the GRC spectrum. But, yeah, essentially, the idea I don’t know if you wanted to take this bit or not, Terry, but the idea behind the podcast was to keep it as light, light as possible. But I’ll let you kind of give the colour around that, if that makes sense.
Terry 03:37
Yes. So. I’ve been listening to lots of podcasts around Cybersecurity and information security, and some of them are really interesting and go into a lot of detail, but I found out that there was not many out there that your average person could quite easily listen to and pick up really valuable information around the security world. So we’re talking about what to look out for in emails, what’s the latest thing going on in the world? So we wanted to try and I wanted to try and bring a podcast together where it was easy for everyone to follow and not some dry and boring security stuff, because security can be boring and it can make you fall asleep. But we don’t want people to fall asleep listening to this. We want people to be involved in it.
Terry 04:26
So that was the meaning behind it. We want to make it light and easy. And I explained to Steve, when I spoke to him quite a few weeks ago, I wanted it to be like, you’re either sitting around the table at home and you’re just shooting the breeze, or you’ve gone to the pub with your mates and you just want to talk about yeah, yeah, exactly.
Steve 04:42
Which kind of brings onto the name of the podcast. I don’t think it was mentioned, was it? Calling it? It’s just plain cyber with the caveat. That it’s. Not just for geeks.
Terry 04:53
Right, yeah. It’s for Doris, who owns a flower shop down the end of the street. That’s it. It’s for say. I always say. Steve, I’ll ask you a question. What appealed to you when you see me post this on LinkedIn about starting a pod?
Terry 05:12 Discussed?
Steve 05:12
Well, there was a couple of things, to be fair. One. I like talking. My job, by its very nature, does generally focus around talking to people. But I have spent a lot of my time learning as much as possibly can around things like this, particularly around the sort of day to day aspects of it that can affect you, which are conversations you and I have discussed leading up to this episode, which we we will obviously venture into either later in this episode or on further ones. Also, the fact that I was looking to launch another webinar series, if you like, but podcasts seem to be where it’s at the moment in terms of it doesn’t give people the necessity to tune in at a certain time. They can kind of listen to it at their leisure.
Steve 06:01
But, yeah, the more you and I spoke, it was more about creating the real world scenarios around things because ultimately, these are things that affect everybody. And it’s also very much taking that low level information, the technical information, that can seem super confusing to people, the layman like myself, and then explaining how that can relate to them in real world life, if that makes sense.
Terry 06:25
Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Steve 06:28
And what made just to flip the script on yourself?
Terry 06:33
Oh, no, you’re not supposed to be doing this.
Steve 06:37
What made you decide to go? Do you know what? I haven’t got enough to do as head of Information Security, I’m going to go out there and launch a podcast as well.
Terry 06:46
Don’t tell my director this. Yeah. I’m excited about security and I’m very passionate about it. I’ve often used my lovely partner and my children as guinea pigs just to learn to see how much they know, and it gives me a good insight to how much people know and how much people don’t know and. I wanted to bring together this big, vast world of cybersecurity, and we will talk about the careers in cybersecurity as we go along in future episodes. But people just think it’s these kids that sit in their basement making code and causing problems for business. But cybersecurity and information security is a big, big world, and it’s not just your kids that sit in the basement on their computers.
Terry 07:41
And we want to get this across to people. One of the areas we’ll look at in our future episodes is this big problem called GDPR. Now, every company talks about GDPR, and it literally is somebody telling you what you can and can’t do. Now, I could sit here for hours and talk to you about GDPR, but. It’s boring. It’s a dry subject. What I wanted to do and I’ve spoke to Steve about this, is I want to look at different parts of GDPR and make it relevant for the real life.
Terry 08:17
So just to give you a little example, I spoke to Steve a couple of weeks ago about profiling. I’m part of one of the articles, and GDPR includes about profiling. It’s quite interesting to understand how profiling works and when you relate it to something that everybody’s applied for a bank account, everybody’s applied for a mortgage, and profiling is heavily involved in that. So when we look at GDPR, we’ll make it relevant. So you, Steve, you can understand GDPR, and anybody in the street can understand GDPR. So these are the kind of subject we’ve got loads of things to talk about, and Steve almost why I tell you a couple of areas that we’re going to cover as we further go along in future episodes.
Steve 09:00
Yeah, no, exactly. And you know what? It’s funny that we’ve had this conversation many times in terms of them. Making it as sort of down to earth as possible. I literally went to the shop today to get some lunch and one of my neighbours asked me what I did for a job. Well, I work in cybersecurity recruitment. He said cybersecurity.
Steve 09:18
What’s that? Is that all the hackers and stuff? And I was like I just said yes because I didn’t have an hour to explain to me that it’s not just that, but this is exactly why we’re doing these, because people hear the word cybersecurity or information security, which, again, is another topic. We will discuss the difference between the two and how there is disconnect between the real world and what you see online. And I have these conversations with my dad all the time as well. Don’t click on this link. My nieces, my sister, everybody.
Steve 09:55
Are there’s so many real world examples of where it’s very easy to read a news article about, let’s say, the MGM hacking the week? They got a ransomware attack, et cetera, et cetera, locked ransomware, do you know what I mean? But that all came from accessing a public lock that came from a very low well, yeah, whether you call it low level or high level, a very public access point which could have been prevented and obviously that’s a really high profile example of it, but this is pretty much what we want to talk about. But also at the same time, we want to keep it as light as possible. We’re not trying to bore anybody, we want to try and add some humour. I’m sure everybody will get to learn a bit about my personality and Terry’s personality as we go along and I’m sure we’ll add some jokes in there and then ultimately we’re going to get some other people to come in and have a conversation as know, maybe talk about things like firewalls. Firewalls again, a firewall is a word that every person that owns a laptop top or a PC or an Apple Mac or anything has heard the word says yeah, we won’t go into too much detail in explaining people what a firewall is because that is quite technical.
Terry 11:12
To. We want to keep it quite light. And if you don’t understand it, Steve, then it’s pointless just going out because you’re the biggest guinea pig we have. I’m happy to be a guinea pig. That’s fine. We’ll also talk about data protection as well. And Steve will also talk about careers and the different areas of cybersecurity or information security you can go into.
Terry 11:38
We’ll tell you some of our funny stories we’ve experienced through our many years in our job roles. We might have a section in there where we can get listeners to ask us questions and we can look at them questions later on in a future episode. We want this to be us talking, but also heavily involved with you guys out there in the big wide world.
Steve 12:04
Sure. And also. Terry and I don’t live a million miles away from each other. We’re both in the Midlands for our sins, aren’t we?
Terry 12:14 Only via job choice.
Steve 12:18
I just can’t afford to live in London, mate, that’s all it but listen, to say that if this does start to pick up a little bit momentum, we wouldn’t start to do these things in person again. It meant to be like a pub chat. We can meet up in a pub and all of us and the more heads of the merrier, we can have these conversations. It’s meant to be interesting stuff that everybody can relate to.
Terry 12:44
Yeah. And as you said there, we will bring in people who know more about certain areas of security than we do. We’ll also bring in people like ourselves that just have an interest in it and just see what their view on cybersecurity is or information security to make it really light. I’m looking forward to this. It’s going to be a great adventure. We want to get you guys involved as much as we can.
Steve 13:12
No, for sure. I think particularly the mean. I’m very active on social media. Terry, you’re relatively active on social media. We’ll be putting stuff out there if there are topics that people are interested in. Whether you are somebody who works in a totally different field that has an interest in getting into information and cybersecurity. Whether you’re somebody that’s a level one security analyst, whether you’re somebody that’s.
Steve 13:40
A lead security engineer that wants to learn more about the less technical side of things. We’re going to try and keep it as light as possible, but the more topics that people give us to talk about, the more information we’ve got. And I’m sure there’s a lot of people we can pull information from and opinions from that we can try and create real world scenarios out of. So, yeah, the more interaction we get from other people, the better.
Terry 14:06
Yeah, no, totally agree. So we hope that you guys will enjoy it as much as us because it is just a bit lighthearted. We’ll try and cover as many topics as we can and we’ll take it from there and we’ll see how we go. Go on, Steve. I’m sorry.
Steve 14:27
No, I’ll let you finish, mate. I was just going to say, yeah, no, I appreciate anybody that’s listening. And I figured this is probably we were going to use this one as an introductory episode, so kind of gives an idea of what we’re going to be covering, gives people time to come back to us.
Terry 14:43
How long are these episodes going to be, then, Steve? What did we agree on?
Steve 14:47
I think about 25, 30 minutes, wasn’t it?
Terry 14:50
People get bored after that.
Steve 14:52
No, they do. I’m a stick, cliff, a podcast. But even the longer ones, I split them up through days, because today everyone’s attention span is quite short. So this is 25, 30 minutes. Whether that’s a travel to work in the morning, travel home, could be a lunch break. You might be fortunate enough to live at home and just live at home.
Terry 15:14
Well, live at home, Steve. Everybody lives at home.
Steve 15:18
Work from home. Work from home. Yeah. The idea is to keep it short, but sweet, light hearted, and something you’d be able to take in and hopefully take something from.
Terry 15:32
Yeah. Every episode we release will also have a title in there to what it’s covering. So if it’s something that you’re interested in, then it’s there for you. And we were going to start trying to do this at least once a month. Because we wanted the information in these 25 30 minutes podcast to be valuable and not just mundane. Same thing over and over again. So that’s the plan going forward.
Steve 16:01
Yeah, exactly that. I guess that about wraps things up for this one.
Terry 16:06
Yeah. As we’ve not done any data sensitive information, we’ll leave the disclaimer world till the first episode.
Steve 16:16
Our views are our own.
Terry 16:18
Yeah, our views are our own. Even though stupid they may be.
Steve 16:23
Exactly, mate. Yeah, no, it’s been enjoyable. Yeah, I’m looking forward to it.
Terry 16:29
Brilliant. Right, okay, let’s sign off for this first episode and this first introduction, and I hope you join us in our next one. Thanks very much, guys.
Steve 16:38
Guys, see you later. Bye.
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