2023 Year in Review

Another year has flown by, and as we begin 2024 it's important for us to pause for a moment, reflect, and look back on the amazing year that 2023 was.

First of all, we want to say a big THANK YOU to all of our customers, partners, advocates, allies, and friends. Being a cyber security company in Australia is a fantastic eco-system and environment to be part of. We are really proud of not only the work that we do at Retrospect Labs, but also all of the people we get to work with. Of course, that sense of pride extends to our team - without them we wouldn't be able achieve what we have since the founding of the company in 2019.

Highlights

Every year seems to go quicker and quicker, and that's no doubt due to the things we achieve each and every day. Some of the standout achievements from team Retrospect Labs this year though were:

• Expanding our international reach - we've previously delivered activities in both Thailand and Laos. In 2023 took us to Tonga and Samoa!  In 2024, we're back to Thailand and then off to Vanuatu to continue to help critical infrastructure organisations within our region improve their incident response readiness.
• Doubling the number of customers who subscribe to our cyber security exercise platform, Gauntlet.
• Listening to our customers and continuously shipping capability to help them achieve their goals through Gauntlet.
• Delivering more than 60 exercises as a service - there was a lot of travel.
• Growing the size of our team - with a few new starters in early 2024, we will be a team of 14 amazing people!

Gauntlet

As always, our product team were extremely busy in 2023 with a strong focus on making sure that Gauntlet, our cyber security exercise platform, is as awesome as it can be. There were many behind the scenes achievements to keep and improve upon Gauntlet's performance, security, and resilience.

Here are some of the main features that our customers got to see and use:

• Time zones - display all times in Gauntlet in a time zone of your choosing.
• OS notification - making it easy to stay up to date with important developments in the exercise.
• SAML Single Sign-On (SSO) - enabling our customers to leverage their identity provider which improves security and their staff's user experience.
• Presenter view - to better display the exercise view when delivering the exercise in person.
• Mailbox upgrades - to quickly and easily see and respond as personas (entities normally involved in real incidents but are not participating in the exercise).
• Exercise Control - a new permission type within an exercise to allow any user to become an Exercise Controller and facilitate the exercise.
• MITRE ATT&CK integration - exercises and (soon to be) injects can be tagged against MITRE ATT&CK IDs to allow for better tracking across the different techniques that organisations face.
• Response Lab integration (in Beta) - our secure, isolated, forensics environment that can be deployed on demand to support exercises.

Customer Success

In early 2023, we started a new function - customer success. We'd reached enough customers that meant we needed someone in a full-time role to support these customers. And we're really glad that we made the decision to establish this as a role! We've seen our customers grow, their ability to use Gauntlet increase, and the meaningfulness of the exercises they run increase at the same time.

In 2023, we onboarded a customer who was committed to running monthly exercises. This has been one of the most enjoyable customer success stories of 2023 for us! Getting to work with a customer on a monthly basis means we've been able to watch (and help them) run a variety of different exercises, across multiple threat/incident types, and see the uplift they've been able to achieve for their team. We're looking forward to continuing to work closely with this customer into 2024, as they continue their aggressive incident response uplift campaign.

Partnerships and Collaborations

2023 was also a year of growth in terms of our collaborators and partnerships! For the third year in a row, we continued our successful collaboration with the Australian Women in Security Network. We not only delivered our exercise-based incident response training course to more than 65 women throughout Australia, but we also successfully delivered our annual AWSN Incident Response Competition. We saw 200 participants from all parts of Australia, and it was once again amazing to see so many women come together, work together, and experience what a real incident can look and feel like. Many thanks to the Australian Signals Directorate for funding this competition with AWSN.

We continued our successful collaboration with TAFEcyber, a conglomerate of Australian-based TAFE's who offer a cyber course(s) as part of their curriculum. We delivered another Incident Response competition for 200 students all around Australia in 2023, and just like last year's competition we were blown away by the eagerness, aptitude, and skills the students demonstrated throughout the challenge.

We also formed some new and exciting partnerships in 2023, especially with other small, niche companies that are experts in their chosen domains. These partnerships are critical for us to ensure that what we deliver is as comprehensive as possible and provides the best outcomes for those we are fortunate to deliver services for.

Team

We mentioned the team at the beginning of this blog post. Truly, we continue to be impressed and in awe of the people we are privileged to work alongside with at Retrospect Labs. Our team works incredibly hard to achieve all our ambitious goals - from building unique and innovative features in Gauntlet, through to delivering world class cyber security exercises as a service for critical infrastructure and government.

A significant team highlight this year was our company retreat to Bali, where we managed to get away for a few days together and to relax and enjoy being in the same place for once!

2024

We got a lot of plans for 2024. From formalising our commitment to security internally via globally recognised certifications, through to experimenting with new technologies to make Gauntlet even better. 2024 is predicted to be another exciting year. We'd like to thank everyone who continues to support us - you make it easy for us to keep showing up, even on the tough days.

2024 - here we come!