Opening keynote speech at the Seattle Electrical Conference

Kayne McGladrey, field CISO at Hyperproof, has seen the evidence. He worked with one organization whose executives received a contract for review and signature. “Nearly everything looked right,” McGladrey says. The only noticeable mistake was a minor error in the company’s name, which the chief counsel caught. But Gen AI isn’t just boosting the hackers’ speed and sophistication, it’s also expanding their reach, McGladrey says. Hackers can now use gen AI to create phishing campaigns with believable text in nearly any language, including those that have seen fewer attack attempts to date because the language is hard to learn or rarely spoken by non-native speakers.

People may aptly sum up 2020 in a single word: crisis. An inadequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people globally. The underlying data are more tragic, as the pandemic has disproportionately affected communities of color that have lived with the daily existing threats of shrinking economic mobility and racism. At the same time, both public and private organizations have struggled to mount an effective defense against cybercrime, which represents not only one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history but also threatens public trust in democracy and civil society. This article provides context and actionable steps to begin to dismantle the underpinnings of these long-standing crises; however, this article is not the solution. Only sustained action will lead to meaningful change.

The affirmative defenses combined with making strategic decisions based on published facts is a compelling reason for organizations to select and plan to adopt a framework before the start of the next budgetary year.

Global supply chains have been under intense strain in recent months, a situation that has been made even worse by the growth of cyber attacks, especially in the form of ransomware. The transportation sector, which has been largely deregulated, needs to adopt recommendations by industry and government organizations for implementing measures that they might have overlooked in years. The price of failing to do so can be high, with ransomware attacks threatening to shut down critical logistics operations for days or even longer.