Orange Cyberdefense

SensePost was founded in Pretoria in 2000 and grew into one of South Africa's most respected ethical hacking companies, known for its security assessments, its published research and its hacking courses, which have been taught at Black Hat. In 2019 it became part of Orange Cyberdefense, and from August 2020 the business traded under the Orange Cyberdefense name, with SensePost continuing as the ethical hacking team.

SensePost is one of South Africa's best known security and penetration testing businesses. Its team has helped governments and blue-chip companies review and protect their information security, and its hacking courses have been taught at Black Hat. With SensePost now part of Orange Cyberdefense, Origin was asked to design a new website for the whole business: its services, training courses, history, values and people. It was a chance to work with a global company like Orange, and it came with real conditions. The site had to follow Orange's corporate identity and brand guidelines closely, while still carrying the character that made SensePost worth hiring and worth learning from.

Two things had to sit on one page without either one giving way. The Orange brand is polished and global. SensePost is a small team of practitioners who research, break things for a living and teach others how to do it. A site that only followed the brand book would have read as a corporate security vendor, and a site that only followed the SensePost instinct would have ignored a brand the parent company rightly protects.

The audience made it harder. Visitors range from a CISO comparing security assessment providers to a developer deciding which course to book, and both are technical enough to spot marketing padding straight away.

We treated the Orange guidelines as the frame and SensePost's culture as the content inside it. Colour, type, logo use and spacing stayed on brand, while the structure, tone and detail were built around what the team actually does: hack, defend and teach.

Services and training as equals: assessments, managed security and hacking courses each got a clear route from the home page, so a buyer and a student could each find their way in without reading past the other.

History, values and people made visible: more than twenty years of research, the way the team works and the individuals behind it sit inside the site, because in this field trust is placed in people before it is placed in a company.

A badge for every course: instead of a plain list of course titles, each training course received its own badge, giving students something to recognise, share and be proud of.

The finished website carried SensePost's services, training courses, history, values and people on the Orange Cyberdefense brand, designed for desktop and mobile from the start. Five course badges were designed for the training programme: Hands on Hacking Fundamentals, Web Application Hacking, Infrastructure Hacking, Introduction to Red Teaming and Unplugged: Modern WiFi Hacking. Each shares one emblem so they read as a family, with its own icon and label so every course is recognisable at a glance.

SensePost's services and courses now have a home inside the Orange Cyberdefense web presence, built to the group's brand guidelines and delivered on brand. The site carries the team's culture, courses, history, values, people, services and training in one place, on desktop and on mobile.

For Orange Cyberdefense, it meant the South African team could join a global brand without being flattened by it. For prospective clients and students, it meant a clearer picture of what SensePost does and who does it. Had the team simply been folded into a generic corporate template, the character that makes a hacking course worth attending would have been lost, and the badges that students now earn would never have existed.