The National Science Foundation has awarded Georgia State’s Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Research Group (EBCS) nearly $300,000 for a pilot program to teach students advanced cybersecurity research skills and match them with CISOs, with whom they will test tools to improve organizations’ security.
In recent years, Enterprise Risk Management has become increasingly focused on cybersecurity risks. While this focus on cyber is understandable, the current COVID crisis has demonstrated that the unpredictable nature of cascading risks requires viewing risk through a much wider risk aperture. One way forward to successfully navigate this new risk frontier is the establishment of a Risk Operations Center (ROC). The ROC enables enterprise and technology leaders to have the continuous monitoring they require to proactively mitigate all cyber issues. Additionally, it fully supports the CISO/cybersecurity leader's principal responsibilities identified by the HBR survey.
As the head of information security for a technology company with more than a thousand (now mostly-remote) employees, the COVID-19 pandemic has been — among other adjectives — an educational experience. And while it hasn’t been completely smooth sailing, I believe one of the reasons we were able to transition so quickly to remote work with relatively few hiccups is that we established practices to withstand precisely this type of scenario long before the virus swept through our community.
As the financial services industry moves toward an ever-greater dependence on technology, we must always keep an eye on the future to ensure that any new technological advancement or implementation delivers the same, if not better, benefits and risk management capabilities. One emerging area that has garnered a lot of attention in recent years is Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). While DLT holds great promise, there is currently no clear path around how to implement the technology in a way that addresses documented and evolving security risks.
The EDPB’s FAQs resolve some open questions, such as whether there will be a grace period for companies relying on Privacy Shield, but raise other questions, such as what “supplementary measures” companies need to put in place to use Standard Contractual Clauses and Binding Corporate Rules.
In the wake of the Court of Justice of the European Union’s Schrems II judgment, on July 23, 2020, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) adopted a Frequently Asked Questions document to “provide initial clarification and give preliminary guidance to stakeholders on the use of legal instruments for the transfer of personal data to third countries, including the U.S.” The EDPB stated that the document will be updated, and further guidance provided, as it continues to examine and consider the judgment. The six-page FAQs provides the following guidance.
Zero Trust model creator John Kindervag puts it like this: “The point of Zero Trust is not to make networks, clouds, or endpoints more trusted; it's to eliminate the concept of trust from digital systems altogether.” He came up with the model in 2010, at a time when many businesses were just beginning to put foundational cybersecurity controls in place and over-relied on the assumed security inside their enterprise-owned network boundaries.
Honeypots were the first form of deception technology. IT security researchers started using them in the 1990s, with the intent to deceive malicious actors who had made it onto the network into interacting with a false system. In this way, honeypots could gather and assess the behavior of the malicious actors. They were not created for threat detection. However, things have changed a great deal in the years since honeypots were created – including deception technology.
Security has been and always will be important to humans. At the deepest level, all humans have an innate desire for security and protection and this desire now extends to our digital footprint.