Interview on diversity and security

The biggest issue with prioritizing software fixes is that there’s often a disconnect between security controls and business risk outcomes, according to Kayne McGladrey, IEEE senior member and field CISO at Hyperproof, a security and risk company. That makes it harder to get executive support, he says. Code maintenance and dependency management aren’t sexy topics. Instead, executive interest tends to focus “on the financial or reputational repercussions of downtime,” McGladrey tells CSO.

“To address this problem, organizations should document and agree upon the business risks associated with both first-party and third-party code. Then they need to determine how much risk they’re willing to accept in areas like reputational damage, financial damage, or legal scrutiny. After there’s executive-level consensus, business owners of critical systems should work to identify and implement controls to reduce those risks,” McGladrey says.

The focus has been on knowing where the crown jewels sit and protecting that space. CSHub Executive Board Member and IEEE Public Visibility Initiative spokesperson Kayne McGladrey notes, “if you don’t know where your data live, you can’t apply any effective policies around access controls or do any meaningful incident response or do any meaningful security awareness.”

Kayne McGladrey, an advisory board member for the Technology Alliance Group NW, warns that these scams can be effective when highly targeted. He says the schemes work when supporting larger campaigns underway prior to any SMS outreach.

Telehealth was an unexpected technology bright spot in 2020, as the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) relaxed enforcement of certain aspects of HIPAA, helping to reduce COVID exposure via virtual rounding and virtual visits.

Unfortunately, bad actors have shown a lack of morality in their pursuit of illegal profits and have continued to attack medical organizations. Ransomware attacks, for example, can cripple a hospital’s abilities to provide high-quality patient care by denying access to key computer systems, which would force medical professionals to have to treat patients based on memory and paper-based records.

The following three high-level recommendations provide a basis for defense in depth for healthcare organizations in 2021.

Venture capitalists will accelerate feature development via mergers and acquisitions. In recent years, VCs have funded point solution vendors for technologies like SOAR and UEBA. These are features, not stand-alone technologies, and it’s often cheaper for market leaders to buy rather than build new features. CISOs should be aware of this market reality, as buying early-stage cybersecurity from a startup carries the risk of unintentionally having a business relationship with a much larger vendor within two years, and consequently needing to either buy the larger technology solution or rip and replace after the acquisition closes.