Keynote slides from TagNW Summit 2019

Over the past year and a half, school administrators, teachers, and IT support staff and students themselves have been working in a complex threat environment. The pandemic and major increase in cyberattacks has resulted in closures for both in-person and online schools. While this will only continue into 2022, it will be importance for security and IT professionals that support schools to align their policies, procedures, and technical controls to a cybersecurity framework that fits the needs of their organization, such as the recently announced K-12 resources announced jointly by the FBI and CISA. Using a formal framework can help schools effectively identify and mitigate gaps in school security postures without substantial budget increases. Schools should also consider a quarterly exercise to re-audit their password stores, as the number of compromised passwords will only continue to increase in the year ahead. A password that was secure three months ago may have appeared in a data breach (especially since students and adults tend to use the same passwords for multiple accounts) and may no longer be a secure option. Although it’s hard to predict what’s to come for educational institutions moving forward and future of remote and hybrid learning is going to be uncertain, education professionals should expect to see threat actors continue to target schools that have not taken a proactive approach to cybersecurity and deployed the appropriate defenses.

A hacker can say that an institution has 90 days to fix a vulnerability before publicly divulging the secret, and for the vulnerable bank or credit union, that might come off as extortion or a threat. However, it is well within the boundaries of normal security research to do that, according to Kayne McGladrey, Field CISO for the security and compliance company Hyperproof.

“If the company doesn’t respond in a timely manner, that’s where you can get vulnerability disclosures after a reasonable period of time, like 90 or 120 days, or 180 days, depending on which philosophy the researcher subscribes to,” McGladrey said. “That’s all well within the ethical boundaries of a normal security researcher.”

The key difference between an ethical and unethical hacker — between extortion and responsible disclosure — is what the hacker does with the vulnerability.

“I think it’s very possible to say you can prove you can use this vulnerability — maybe it’s to steal a whole bunch of credit card information — without actually doing it,” McGladrey said. “You just show that you can.

In this Help Net Security video, Kayne McGladrey, IEEE Senior Member, discusses best practices for using digital wallets safely. With the adoption of digital wallets and the increasing embedding of consumer digital payments into daily life, ensuring security measures is essential. According to a McKinsey report, digital payments are now mainstream and continually evolving, bringing advancements and new data protection and fraud prevention challenges.

“We talk about ‘data breaches’ because of regulatory and statutory definitions that focus on the disclosure of data. An organization’s security strategy should work with the end in mind and focus heavily on denying threat actors access to those data with the highest regulatory, statutory, or contractual risks.” Kayne McGladrey, Field CISO at Hyperproof

I’ll be speaking on WWJ-AM (Detroit, MI) today at 12:30 PM ET. Looking forward to discussing cyber security with Brian Larsen.

“Not all high schools are promoting cybersecurity as a career option, and working in the SOC can have the knock-on effect of bringing people in who were unaware of the field before,” says Kayne McGladrey, a senior member at IEEE. Even if they don’t go on to take cyber jobs, “working in the SOC gives them exposure to some of the language and risks common in cybersecurity,” he says. “Then, if they’re working as developers, it’ll influence the direction by which they create things. They’ll at least have security in mind.”