Special Guest Michael Chaoui | Drafting Compliance Ep. 24

Venture capitalists will accelerate feature development via mergers and acquisitions. In recent years, VCs have funded point solution vendors for technologies like SOAR and UEBA. These are features, not stand-alone technologies, and it’s often cheaper for market leaders to buy rather than build new features. CISOs should be aware of this market reality, as buying early-stage cybersecurity from a startup carries the risk of unintentionally having a business relationship with a much larger vendor within two years, and consequently needing to either buy the larger technology solution or rip and replace after the acquisition closes.

Another issue associated with connected vehicles is around the data they collect and transmit. ”We have seen nation states that want to conduct surveillance, whether on their own domestic population or on foreign populations, use telemetry from hotels, airports, and rental car carriers to determine where individuals are moving,” notes McGladrey. “If it is possible for a dedicated adversary to subvert that communications channel—either directly with a vehicle or by gaining a foothold inside of some telemetry aggregator service, probably the manufacturer—all of a sudden they can know where people are going within in a few feet. If you can associate a user’s identity with their vehicle or location, you have a high degree of fidelity to conduct attacks.”

It is a matter of whether the threat actor has sufficient resources (both staffing and financial resources) and the motivation. The real question is about the likelihood of a threat: an always-on internet-connected medical device will have a very different threat profile than a medical device that requires direct physical access.

Full video of my presentation on Managing the Risks of the Future Internet of Things at the 2019 IEEE VICS in San Diego, CA.

Join Tom Coughlin, J.L. Doty, Gloria Washington, Kathleen Kramer and me as we explore the jobs we’ll see created over the next 20 years, industry’s role driving innovation and the skills our future workforce will need.

Recognizing that fact, Kayne McGladrey, director of security and information technology at Pensar Development, an engineering consultancy in Seattle, says continuously phishing end users is the best way to help them identify phishing and other potentially malicious content. “This continuous exposure [to phishing] should take a variety of forms, from email-based phishing to direct messages on social media.”

McGladrey says short, actionable, culturally relevant education initiatives on a regular schedule are recommended because “users don’t want to sleep through the mandatory ‘October is cybersecurity month,’ two-hour, PowerPoint presentations.”