Managing the Risks of the Future Internet of Things

“I think we’re going to have an unprecedented number of breaches being announced following the pandemic,” said Kayne McGladrey, member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

“After all, AI serves as both a force accelerator, as it will allow those threat actors to operate at large scale without having to increase the size of their workforce. At the same time, the ability of AI to generate convincing-enough speech in another language will serve to open new markets to threat actors who might have previously employed linguists,” says Kayne McGladrey, IEEE Senior Member.

Cybersecurity failures were definitely in the news in 2024, but the year’s most serious issue — the outage at security vendor CrowdStrike, which affected millions of Windows systems around the world — wasn’t the result of a intentional attack, notes Kayne McGladrey, Field CISO at Hyperproof and senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It was caused by a flaw in an update of the CrowdStrike software. Yet it cost a wide range of companies, including airlines, public transit, healthcare and financial services, an estimated $5.4 billion.

Large-scale cyber attacks will continue to pose a substantial risk to companies, individuals and economies in 2022. Several factors contribute to this trend, and unfortunately, policies and technical responses have yet to reduce the frequency and impact of cyber attacks.

Tune in KXL-FM (Portland, OR) at 4 PM Pacific for a discussion on the intersection of cyber security, agriculture, and the cloud.

To reduce the risks of an accidental or intentional cybersecurity incident, companies must deploy an effective data loss prevention and associated data retention strategy across endpoints and data storage locations, including cloud services, noted Kayne McGladrey (@kaynemcgladrey), Security Architect at Ascent Solutions LLC.

“Many data breaches would have been less extensive and severe if organizations had automated data disposition schedules, as threat actors cannot steal what companies are not storing,” he continued. “Data covered by one or more regulatory or statutory requirements should be automatically labeled where possible so that controls (like encryption) follow the data regardless of storage location.”