Pussycat, Pussycat, where have you been? I’ve been to London and saw the Queen.

Yesterday, I went to the opening of the National Cyber Security Centre by Her Majesty the Queen and HRH the Duke of Edinburgh. This was a more exclusive event than I had expected, and guests outside the NCSC were royalty, ministers, senior civil servants & people running NCSC partner companies.

The NCSC showed our countermeasures system to disrupt malware, phishing and advance fee fraud to guests, though I don’t know whether the Queen saw it, as she & Prince Philip had a private viewing of the demonstrations.

I was introduced to the Queen and HRH Duke of Edinburgh, which I hadn’t anticipated, and there’s a picture from the Royal Family’s twitter feed of me telling the Queen (sadly out of the picture to the left) and the Duke of Edinburgh what we do & how it works. I sensed that they liked the notion of counterattacking and disrupting attacks as opposed to passively blocking them. And, although our business is spread all around the world, it felt good to be contributing to something that makes the UK a safer and better place.

HRH the Duke of Edinburgh asks how it works

I must say how impressive the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh are and how good they were with people at the event. At 90 & 95 respectively, few, if any people can have had more experiences and in a world where some of the most powerful elected politicians seem completely frazzled, how urbane & reasonable our monarch appears by contrast.