The social and economic impacts of political violence don’t often match. Terror attacks can accomplish their main objective of striking fear into a local population while not significantly interfering with commerce, and broad waves of unrest have the potential for supply chain disruption, local business closures lasting for days, and repair and remediation that can become quite costly. There’s a third category that doesn’t get enough attention in policy and academic circles: insurance industry losses.
The two most common methods of security guard communications in use today are cell phones and two-way radios. Security managers can have difficulty in deciding which system is best used on a particular job site. Should they use two-way radios, cell phones or both?
A recent survey conducted by Rave showed that only 22% of respondents completely trust the information they receive from local officials. Many factors – such as the spread of disinformation, social unrest and the ongoing pandemic – likely contribute to this low level of trust. However, it still poses a big problem to local leaders who are trying to keep residents safe – especially during the ongoing pandemic. We connected with Todd Miller, SVP of Strategic Programs at Rave Mobile Safety, to talk about how local governments and organizations can go about re-building trust in their communities by communicating effectively with residents.
Establishing operational resilience in the face of cyberattacks has become a top priority for organizations. As a core component of the IT infrastructure, Active Directory (AD) must be at the center of that process. But who is responsible for ensuring Active Directory is both protected and can be recovered quickly when a cyberattack occurs? In many organizations the answer is not clear, which can lead to missteps in detecting, defending against, and responding to cyberattacks.
Even if you are not mandated to adhere to any particular regulations, it still makes sense for your business to be proactive in managing risk. All frameworks include guidance for good cybersecurity hygiene, such as effective inventory and asset management, contingency planning, personnel security, system access control, and staff awareness and training, to list a few. To prepare for the aftermath of a cyber incident, frameworks provide incident response guidelines you can follow to recover and try to limit the damage. Establishing a framework can not only help your organization follow best practices but also bring rigorous cyber discipline to your organization.
For many years, the focus on securing OT environments has been on the imminent danger of a cyberattack upon critical infrastructure, in other words, SCADA/ICS attacks. Most of the concern has been on nation state actors like China, North Korean, Iran and Russia directly attacking and destroying our infrastructure.
While cybersecurity attack methods are rapidly evolving, it's more often than not a misuse of administrative privileges and weak or stolen credentials that are enough to breach any critical infrastructure. Let's take the attack on the water treatment plant for example—all it took for the unidentified perpetrator was one unprotected password to access and handle the control systems remotely. Time and again, incidents like this prove that when passwords are stored in secure vaults and are subject to standard security practices, the chances of getting hacked are far lower.
COVID made “flatten the curve” a household phrase in 2020, but did you know the concept also applies to vulnerability exploits? It turns out that what’s past is prologue in exploit trends. By tracking which attacks are being exploited the most, organizations discover important information to help proactively determine their vulnerability and risk. But it is also important to track attacks where activity has increased the most within a specified timeframe. It only takes one critical exploit to cause significant damage and, once inside the network, the attacker will need to move laterally and probably deploy additional exploits. That’s why understanding which exploits have the greatest likelihood of arriving on the network’s doorstep helps organizations prioritize patch management and risk assessment. This remains top of mind as cyber adversaries continue to maximize vulnerabilities, as we have recently seen with DearCry ransomware, for example.
Communication was already a challenge in the security industry with widespread teams or lone personnel in siloed locations. Now that COVID-19 has virtually eradicated in-person interactions and many team members are only working remotely, it is all the more difficult to keep everyone synced. The entire face of security communications has changed, escalating the need to find alternate ways to connect with the growing remote workforce. Internal and external communications are merging as security companies struggle to manage disconnected teams. Remote work now requires mobile communication delivery at an unprecedented level. Security professionals are discovering faster, more effective ways to communicate with simple, plug-and-play digital solutions.
RSS
