The White House eliminated the position of cybersecurity coordinator on the National Security Council this week. The post was central to developing policy to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and the use of offensive cyber weapons.
The new strategy is “aimed at ensuring the availability of critical national functions” and “fostering efficiency, innovation, trustworthy communication, and economic prosperity in ways consistent with our national values and that protect privacy and civil liberties.”
Destructive attacks continue to rise with ransomware families leading the pack by growing three-fold during the year and affecting the healthcare industry the most, says a new report.
Female and male cybersecurity professionals share the same workplace values, priorities and aspirations. Both place about the same level of importance on matters such as salary and working close to home – and both apply roughly the same skills to their work and view protecting people and data as their primary function, according to recent (ISC)2 research.
Cybersecurity breaches make headline news, seemingly on a daily basis. Private data for millions of consumers is compromised at greater frequency. Organizations scramble to remediate damages and restructure their cyber defense tactics. To address this new normal and further protect personal information from data breaches, the European Union will formally implement the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on May 25, 2018.
Whenever there’s a data breach, it’s easy to get caught up in the root cause analysis – a misconfigured device, an unpatched application, an employee falling for a phishing attack, you name it. But really, the root causes of most breaches are not these moment-in-time errors. Instead, they are almost always shortsighted decisions made well before the breach ever occurs.
In today’s complex digital world, cybersecurity threats are high and rising. The Identity Resource Center’s 2017 Annual Data Breach Year-End Review reports publicly-disclosed data breaches were up 45 percent from 2016. And the 2018 Thales Global Data Threat Report notes that 71 percent of U.S. enterprises have suffered at least one data breach “over the past several years,” with 46 percent reporting a breach “in the past year,” up from 24 percent in the prior survey. As cyber threat volume and sophistication increase, financial institutions of all sizes are challenged to maintain and prove cyber safety and soundness.