The Trojan Horse Never Went Away

We have spent billions building better security technology and people are still being caught by the same basic trick humans were falling for 3,000 years ago: trust the thing that looks familiar enough to let it in.

That might be an email, a Microsoft login page, a Teams message, a QR code, a supplier request or even a voice that sounds exactly like somebody you know.

The technology changes. The psychology does not.

In this keynote, Tom Reveley takes the audience from the original Trojan Horse to the way modern cyber attacks really work. Not with scare stories, endless statistics or technical jargon, but with real examples of how attackers exploit trust, urgency, familiarity and perfectly normal human behaviour.

Tom has spent more than 20 years working in technology and cyber security, dealing with the decisions businesses make before, during and after things go wrong. He has seen first-hand that the biggest weakness is often not the firewall, the software or the antivirus. It is the moment somebody makes a decision they think is completely reasonable.

The point of the talk is not to make people paranoid. It is to make them better at recognising when something does not quite add up, and confident enough to stop and check before one small decision becomes a very expensive problem.