As much of the world continues to hunker down at home in response to COVID-19, threat actors continue to find ways of exploiting the crisis to gather sensitive and valuable information from individuals. But while we’re busy making sure that our primary computers and cloud-based accounts are locked down, it’s often the devices we least suspect – our smartphones – that provide the opening that hackers need. The 2018 hacking of Jeff Bezos’s iPhone X, perhaps the most famous example of smartphone hacking, provides an important reminder that these most personal of devices should be used with appropriate caution, especially in this time of upheaval.
As part of reorganizing and updating safety functions at the University of Utah, Chief Safety Officer Marlon C. Lynch created a new position to direct Campus Security and to oversee public safety compliance and accreditation.
Today's challenging reality presents an opportunity for CISO’s to reevaluate the economics and efficiencies of their current infosec program. To do so, CISO’s must narrow their focus on maximizing their return on investments and shift to a risk-based prioritization strategy. No matter the situation, CISO’s are always expected to meet goals and drive results. Even though security professionals cannot reduce risk to zero, they can reduce risk significantly by first eliminating the most impactful risks facing their organization. Below, I discuss the four critical steps of leading an economical and efficient information security program while following a risk-based approach.
Countless businesses export data from the European Union to the United States. Does your human resources office have information on European employees? The sales department information on European clients? That is personal data. The question is if data exports can continue in the wake of the Court of Justice of the European Union’s (CJEU) ruling in the “Schrems II” case.
By implementing a data protection by design approach, both before and during product development, organizations will build more trust with customers and end users, and curtail risk of future privacy-related conflicts.
Before COVID, cybersecurity was a concern for businesses everywhere. In fact, in Microsoft’s 2019 Global Risk Perception Survey, 57 percent of companies ranked cybersecurity as a higher risk than economic uncertainty and brand reputation or damage. Looking ahead, what does all of this mean for the role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)? Not only is it more important than ever before, but the role has shifted since the start of COVID.
Twenty years ago, almost everything in the IT world was on-premises: hardware and software, including the tools you used to verify who your users were and what they could do in your systems. In today’s cloud-native world, almost nothing is on-prem, and because of the explosion of apps, remote users and devices, it has become a considerably more complicated task, by orders of magnitude, to verify the identity of a user — or a service — and determine policies that say what they are and aren’t allowed to do.
Organizations need to evolve their thinking around cybersecurity to stay ahead of these changing threats. A holistic approach that effectively builds security into all infrastructure and processes from the ground up is cost-effective and necessary to safeguard valuable employee and customer data. This requires an overall shift in philosophy – and adopting the concept of security by design is a key first step.
Metrics for security are in wide use in organizations today, with more than 80 percent of respondents to a new SANS Institute survey claiming some level of maturity on their effective use of security metrics.