Leadership that delivers results.

The Challenge

A major financial services organisation had a fragmented security posture with siloed teams, inconsistent controls, and a board with limited visibility of cyber risk. Regulatory scrutiny was increasing and a recent near-miss incident had exposed critical gaps.

The Approach

Alasdair was engaged to lead a comprehensive security transformation programme. This began with a full maturity assessment against NIST CSF and ISO 27001, followed by a structured roadmap to close priority gaps. A key focus was establishing a security governance framework that gave the board clear, actionable risk reporting, translating technical metrics into business risk language for the first time.

The Outcome

Within 18 months, the organisation achieved ISO 27001 certification, reduced its critical vulnerability backlog by 87%, and established a functioning Security Operations Centre. Board-level security reporting was embedded as a standing agenda item, and the organisation passed its regulatory audit with no major findings.

The Challenge

One of the world's largest music industry organisations came under sustained, coordinated cyberattack from a prominent hacktivist collective in 2011. The campaign, motivated by the organisation's legal action against a hacker who had bypassed copyright controls on a consumer device, escalated rapidly from disruptive DDoS attacks into a multi-vector assault. Infrastructure shared across the organisation's global digital ecosystem was targeted, regional websites were defaced and taken offline, phishing links were injected into localised web properties, and a major affiliated platform suffered a data breach affecting tens of millions of users. The scale, speed, and global reach of the attacks overwhelmed existing incident response structures. The Executive Committee required a senior security leader with global reach to help coordinate the response across regions and business units.

The Approach

As Director of Worldwide Infrastructure Security, Alasdair was asked directly by the ExCo to lead and coordinate the global incident response. He established a unified command structure across geographically dispersed security and infrastructure teams, cutting through organisational silos to create a single, coherent response operation. Triage was prioritised across affected regional properties, containing active defacements, removing injected phishing content, and restoring taken-down sites, while parallel forensic workstreams investigated the scope of the broader platform breach. Communications were managed carefully across the ExCo, legal, PR, and regional leadership to ensure consistent, accurate messaging as the situation evolved publicly.

The Outcome

Regional web properties were secured and restored. The injected phishing content was removed and affected infrastructure hardened against further exploitation. The coordinated response structure Alasdair established brought coherence to what had been a fragmented, reactive posture across multiple geographies. The incident drove a fundamental reassessment of the organisation's global security architecture, third-party infrastructure dependencies, and crisis communications protocols, with lasting improvements to incident response capability across the worldwide operation.