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

In this episode of the EM360 Podcast, Analyst Richard Stiennon speaks to Kayne McGladrey, Field CISO at Hyperproof to explore: Automating compliance controls vs SOAR automation, Helping CISOs, and if one master set of controls cover multiple frameworks

Cybersecurity expert Kayne McGladrey speaks about why AI cannot do what creative people can, and the important role of generative AI in SOCs.

The security industry can do a better job of promoting emerging technologies in security environments by linking their solutions to measurable outcomes that matter to CISOs. Those outcomes could be to either reduce sales friction or to show measurable progress in key risk indicators that board members care about. For example, while according to the recent “The Impact of Technology in 2025 and Beyond: an IEEE Global Study,” 48% of technologists said that the top application for AI in 2025 will be real-time cybersecurity vulnerability identification and attack prevention, vendors should still be prepared to explain how investments in their solutions can produce progress over time and support agreed-upon business objectives, outside of the technical benefits. Unfortunately, most emerging technologies primarily discuss technical benefits and features, not business outcomes. For example, if a CISO cares about multifactor authentication coverage, vendors should explain how their solution improves coverage and ties that to higher business resiliency. That would also reduce friction in B2B sales where a high degree of MFA coverage could be cited as a key control in a SOC 2 type 2 report, for example.

“We already have security challenges that we haven’t been able to adequately address,” said Kayne McGladrey, IEEE Senior Member. “The metaverse is likely to inherit these challenges – for example, phishing and theft of credentials has, unsurprisingly, carried over to the metaverse. We’ve seen NFT and cryptocurrency scams, too, in the metaverse.”

Cloud computing will continue to grow despite the frequency of breaches due to a lack of administrative controls and unintentional configuration errors. When an administrator had access to an on-premises server, they could only administer that server; a “cloud administrator” can administer all the assets in a given cloud instance, including backing up and exfiltrating entire servers. This is like the unintentional configuration errors that have plagued so many Amazon S3 buckets in 2019, where organizations have stored PII in S3 in a default configuration, and then those data have been accessed by security researchers.

Migration is a transformative process, which means it needs the full backing of the C-suite. Kayne McGladrey, Director of Information Security Services for Integral Partners, LLC, says it is vital to offer “an effective presentation to the board about the benefits and challenges associated with
the migration, and it has to have a narrative. You have to find stories of success and failure inside
of your industry in order to present the full picture to the board.”

“There are many lessons that the enterprise will learn through piloting—whether it’s identified
security risks, user communication risks, or education risks—all of which provide future guidance,” says Kayne McGladrey, Director of Information Security Services for Integral Partners LLC. “By the time you get to the harder transition elements, including full infrastructure rollout, you’ve already sorted through the main issues, thanks to your pilot-based learning journey.”