Keynote speech at The 24th Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education

To get a sober assessment, we invited Pensar CISO and IEEE member Kayne McGladrey, CISSP into the studio to talk about the variety of risks that remote working introduces. There are some new risks that companies need to account for: from remote access bottlenecks to prying eyes in insecure home offices to insecure home workstations.

Telehealth, often referred to as virtual doctor appointments, has been utilized in remote regions that do not have local medical resources for several decades. But when COVID-19 began impacting many countries across the globe, telehealth became the go-to method for checking in with your doctor about possible COVID-19 symptoms or other healthcare check-ups.

Another way to thwart cyberattacks is to increase the number of cybersecurity experts, McGladrey says. According to the 2017 cybercrime report from the Herjavec Group, cybersecurity firms estimate such crimes are going to cost about $6 trillion annually by 2021. Companies are experiencing shortages in qualified applicants for cybersecurity jobs. The U.S. Department of Commerce estimates there are now about 350,000 unfilled positions, and that number is only going to increase. McGladrey says.

Sharing information about threats can help boost overall cybersecurity by alerting others to those risks, as well as providing successful ways to counteract them, said Kayne McGladrey, national cybersecurity expert, director of security and information technology for Pensar Development, and member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

“They could actually see a reduction in those threats that are commodity threats — threats that are crimes of opportunity [vs. targeted attacks],” he said.

of a growing number of regulations, today’s CISOs and their team members are spending a lot more time responding to questions about their security programs. Providing answers — whether to internal compliance teams who need the information to fulfil legal obligations or external business partners who want assurances — is now an expected part of the modern security department’s responsibilities. Yet it’s not the most effective use of worker time. “It’s not only frustrating, but it also sucks up a lot of time,” says Kayne McGladrey, a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a nonprofit professional association, and field CISO at Hyperproof. There are strategies for meeting security’s obligations to provide information without tying up CISOs and their teams too much, he and others say. McGladrey says automation is one such strategy, saying that “evidence of control operations should be automated, and evidence of effectiveness can also be automated.”

“There are too few defenders to collect, process, and analyze the overwhelming amount of available data to produce threat intelligence,” McGladrey told HITInfrastruture.com. “The promise of machine learning is to allow computers to do what they do well, in automating the collection and processing of indicators of compromise, and analyzing those data against both known and emerging threats.”