37 Cybersecurity Awareness Month Quotes from Industry Experts in 2023

Fraud isn’t new, but the internet has provided hackers with the capabilities to easily use the threat vector to trick employees into providing access to their enterprises. Cyberfraud attacks, often distributed via phishing or spear-phishing campaigns, consistently plague and sometimes even completely disable enterprises. Despite the growing number of technologies available to detect and prevent such social engineering attacks from being successful, the weakest link remains human error — be it negligence, maliciousness or apathy. Here, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers member Kayne McGladrey describes the types of cyberfraud attacks enterprises will inevitably face, from credential harvesting to typosquatting attacks. He also offers best practices for creating and instituting a cybersecurity awareness program to prevent employees from falling victim to such threats.

As the world adjusts to a “new normal” of remote education and work, video conferencing services have surged in demand as people take to these platforms to connect digitally. Yet, these platforms are susceptible to a variety of intrusions that could lead to the theft of private and company data or inappropriately distracting calls and meetings that leave participants feeling they have no control. To protect your students, employees, families and yourself from these types of cyber disruptions, we asked IEEE Member Kayne McGladrey for cybersecurity tips for safe video conferencing.

“If an organization learns that there is a vulnerability being actively exploited — or that a proof of concept for a vulnerability has been developed and is in the wild — they can accelerate patching the affected, vulnerable assets to reduce the likelihood of a successful attack.”

Cybersecurity is a game of cat and mouse. As a threat hunter, you’re the cat. “This role is close to that of a field biologist, as the threat hunter observes their prey – third party attackers – in the wild,” says Kayne McGladrey, director of information security services at Integral Partners, a cybersecurity firm whose specialty is identity and access management, and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. “Threat hunters set traps and snares that appeal to (cybercriminals) and lead to fake computers where the threat hunter can monitor an attacker’s behavior before shutting down the breach.”

“The explosion of connected devices also requires re-thinking the protection mechanisms to apply to those endpoints,” says Kayne McGladrey, Director of Security and IT, Pensar Development. “Similarly, the widespread adoption of cloud-based services means that there’s no single network to protect.”