Time to get on your hoverboards and go Back in Time – learning about the evolution of our nation state threat actors and the birth of cyber.

We know that today our adversarial relationship with the opponent drives rapid technical innovation – for them in exploiting new attack vectors, for us in planning defensive counter measures and response.

But how far back does that go? Have you ever had the extraordinary opportunity to get up close to genuine Cold War spycraft equipment? To be able to see laid out on a table how the tech evolved from mechanical through electromechanical, transistorised then on to digital?

Real espionage tech was routinely destroyed – making surviving artefacts very scarce and expensive, and creating holes in our understanding of our heritage. Over a number of years Mike has researched and created an extensive collection that maps this journey across multiple categories of espionage equipment.

In this presentation you’ll get to see some incredibly rare cold war tech – some the only examples in the southern hemisphere – and the evolutionary milestones that mapped the journey from analog to digital espionage. And you’ll come away with a better understanding of our heritage and opponent, and new respect for the incredible work of the Tech Ops departments of both attackers and defenders.