Top Cybersecurity News for September, 2023: Kayne’s 5 Under 5

“The CIO won’t see the business impact if there’s not a culture of risk mitigation,” says Kayne McGladrey, director of security and IT for Pensar Development and a member of the professional association IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).

“A culture where security is seen as someone else’s problem will derail any conversation around security, so the biggest thing for CISOs is to make the conversation with CIOs around risk – not around technologies or shiny objects but around risks to the business.”

“End-to-end encryption is generally agreed upon as being a useful technology for protecting the data of businesses and consumers,” said IEEE Senior Member Kayne McGladrey. “Online shopping, for example, would not be as popular or feasible if a consumer’s payment information could easily be intercepted. Similarly, private video calls over the internet by senior executives or government officials would be far too risky if anyone could watch.”

What’s needed is “an effective provisioning and de-provisioning system that defines rules for what users can do with data and provides quick auditing of who granted access to the data. There needs to be training around the approval process for granting and revoking access to data; otherwise, organizations risk compliance fatigue and start rubber-stamping all the access requests.”

An ‘acceptable trade-off’ if bankruptcy is the only other option

Kayne McGladrey (@kaynemcgladrey), Cybersecurity Strategist at Ascent Solutions, said delaying or cancelling security projects is “an acceptable trade-off” only if bankruptcy is the alternative.

“Due to the pandemic, this is the choice that some organizations face today,” he continued. “Other organizations should first prioritize their security projects to mitigate those risks with the highest potential impact to the business. Organizations should then have a difficult conversation about residual risks with their cyber insurance providers, and plan to implement monitoring of those risks not transferred to insurance or mitigated through implementation of technical controls.”