Drafting Compliance Episode 1

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.

“If the end user logs on from Seattle, where their mobile phone and laptop is, a connection from New York would be unusual,” McGladrey explained. “It is also possible to note the typing style and speed of a user and use that biometric signature to determine if the user is legitimate. These data [points] make it more difficult for a threat actor to operate silently in the environment.”

Schools also contend with risk born of constant user shifts in the student population. This puts schools in an unusual and unenviable position, Kayne McGladrey, field CISO at Hyperproof, said via email. “Being able to apply real-time policies based on user and device behavior via zero-trust networking becomes critical in this environment,” McGladrey said. Absent these tools, strategies and adequate staff, schools will remain a frequent target for cybercriminals. They could also, at the very least, give schools the confidence needed to refuse ransom demands.

My prediction for 2024: In response to increasing regulatory burdens and the risk of civil litigation, successful companies in 2024 will lean into enhancements in their compliance operations. They will actively collect and test evidence of security control effectiveness, linking these controls directly to their risks, across all critical assets or systems. This approach ensures companies are confident in accurately describing how well they manage their risk portfolio, including in SEC filings. The automation of compliance operations enables security and audit professionals to spend more time doing the parts of their jobs that they love. Furthermore, as supply chain risks intensify scrutiny of B2B transactions, companies will efficiently repurpose many of their controls and control evidence. This strategy not only allows companies to secure additional attestations or certifications such as ISO or SOC 2 without increasing their workforce, but it also provides a significant competitive business advantage.

The overwhelming majority of IoT devices on the market are hot garbage that do not follow security best practices. Allowing consumers to use passwords that have appeared in breaches before makes it easy for threat actors to gain persistence on devices. Devices with no update mechanism means IoT devices become a perpetual threat once the first vulnerability is found. Most people have no way of knowing that their IoT sensor needs an update, so it’s unrealistic to shift the responsibility of software updates to consumers.