Radio interview on KRLD-AM
I’ll be on the air live, discussing cyber security with Chris Sommer of KRLD-AM in Dallas, TX today at 1 PM ET.
Keeping an organization secure is every employee’s job. Instead of the obligatory employee training, Director of Security & IT for Pensar Development Kayne McGladrey recommends continuous engagement with the end-user community. “Provide opportunities and instrumentation to demonstrate policy violations rather than lecture at people.” Examples include leaving a USB data stick in a break room or using phishing tools to falsify emails from known employees that seem suspicious. “This helps educate and creates healthy suspicion,” said McGladrey.
“Ultimately the CSO should report to the Chief Risk Officer, the CRO- because ultimately cyber security is about managing risk at a technical level and at a regulatory level. The natural alignment is with risk. Also maintain a very healthy relationship with internal counsel- especially if there’s chief counsel. Have a coffee every once in a while. And have a healthy relationship with the CIO.”
At the end of January 2020, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) approved the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) with plans to apply this new standard to up to 3,000 subcontractors by the end of 2020. How does this apply to your organization?
While we hope these points have brought into focus some of the evolving challenges in IT security, we also want to point out that certain best practices will continue to underpin how smart security pros approach problems, no matter what the flavor of the month is. “Enterprises are going back to the basics: patching, inventory management, password policies compliant with recent NIST directives,” says Kayne McGladrey, IEEE Member and Director of Security and Information Technology at Pensar Development. “Enterprises are recognizing that it’s impossible to defend what can’t be seen and that the easiest wins are to keep systems up to date and to protect against credential stuffing attacks.”
“As part of the great resignation of 2021, we’ve seen an increasingly fragmented view of intellectual property on the part of departing employees. Businesses can reduce the substantial risk associated with data exfiltration of trade secrets, regulated data and other sensitive data by deploying and monitoring DLP across the enterprise, including remote endpoints.” — IEEE Senior Member Kayne McGladrey