
These blogposts are not written by one team member. The content is provided to you by the whole Axenic Team – or whomever attended on the day.
News & Thoughts from the Axenic Team

These blogposts are not written by one team member. The content is provided to you by the whole Axenic Team – or whomever attended on the day.

If you’re reading this blog, you probably already have some experience with security standards and certifications – maybe you even hold a few yourself. In this blog, I will shed some light on my own journey to gain the QSA qualification and break down the steps I took to make this happen.
When Chris Blunt and I started Axenic back in 2009, John Key was Prime Minister, Barack Obama had just become President of the USA and told Benjamin Netanyahu that he should freeze settlement construction in Gaza to enable movement towards a two-state solution, and a Royal Commission recommended that the 8 Auckland region local government bodies merge to form a “supercity”.
What does the recent report on Microsoft security mean?
In May-June 2023 a hacking group affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of State Security (known as Storm-0558) breached the email of several of Microsoft’s customers including the US State Department, the US Department of Commerce, several UK government organisations as well as customers in other countries. They also compromised the personal email accounts of key individuals involved in US relations with China.

We think that the new version of NIST’s Cyber Security Framework is a significant improvement. There’s one big change, but it is the lots of little changes that add up to a massive overall improvement. New Zealand organisations will still need to do some work to plug some of its idiosyncratic gaps, however.