Hanieh Madad Wins Women in Digital Technical Leader of the Year Award

We’re pleased to share that Hanieh Madad, Senior Software Developer and Team Leader at Patient Zero, has been awarded the Women in Digital Technical Leader of the Year. This award recognises Hanieh’s dedication to her craft and her thoughtful approach to leadership within the tech industry. The judges highlighted Hanieh’s exceptional handling of a complex project, noting her skill in managing stakeholders, mentoring junior engineers, and her commitment to community contributions. In her acceptance speech, Hanieh shared, “I wouldn’t be standing here without my amazing team that I have had the privilege of working with. This award is as much theirs as it is mine.” At Patient Zero, Hanieh leads with a balance of technical expertise and thoughtful mentorship. Known for guiding complex projects to success, she consistently supports her team’s growth and development, making this recognition truly fitting. Congratulations, Hanieh, on this achievement and for the positive impact you continue to make.

Congratulations to three of our team members for being selected as finalists in the ARN Women in ICT Awards 2024. Recognised for their achievements and contributions within Patient Zero, our finalists are: Bay McGovern - Shining Star Demelza Green - Innovation Weasley Au - Graduate “This is a stunning display of emerging and established female talent in Australia,” said ARN Editor Julia Talevski. “This year’s finalists have set an extremely high bar and are a source of inspiration for women leading the way in technology — we are proud and privileged to be celebrating each and every one of them.” WIICTA 2024 will honour the channel across eight categories, spanning Innovation, Technical, Entrepreneur, Graduate, Rising Star, Shining Star, Achievement, and DE&I Individual Champion awards. In response to a wealth of standout submissions, specific categories have been divided to best acknowledge and highlight the depth of female talent in the Australian market. The winners will be announced on September 19th at the prestigious event set to take place at Doltone House in Jones Bay Wharf Sydney. For more information on the ARN Women in ICT Awards 2024, visit the official ARN announcement here .

Red-team challenges have been a fun activity for PZ team members in the past, so we recently conducted a small challenge at our fortnightly brown-bag session, focusing on the burgeoning topic of prompt injection. Injection vulnerabilities all follow the same basic pattern – un-trusted input is inadvertently treated as executable code, causing the security of the system to be compromised. SQL injection (SQLi) and cross-site scripting (XSS) are probably two of the best-known variants, but other technologies are also susceptible. Does anyone remember XPath injection? As generative models get incorporated into more products, user input can be used to subvert the model. This can lead to the model revealing its system prompt or other trade secrets, reveal information about the model itself which may be commercially valuable, subvert or waste computation resources, perform unintended actions if the model is hooked up to APIs, or cause reputational damage to the company if the model can be coerced into doing amusing or inappropriate things. As an example, entrepreneur and technologist Chris Bakke was recently able to trick a Chevy dealership’s ChatGPT-powered bot into agreeing to sell him a Chevy Tahoe for $1 . Although the U.S. supreme court has yet to rule on the legal validity of a “no takesies backsies” contract (as an employee of X Chris is probably legally obligated to drive a Tesla anyway) it is not hard to imagine a future scenario with steeper financial consequences.