Kayne McGladrey – Hyperproof | CISO on the Street | Season 3

Cybersecurity failures were definitely in the news in 2024, but the year’s most serious issue — the outage at security vendor CrowdStrike, which affected millions of Windows systems around the world — wasn’t the result of a intentional attack, notes Kayne McGladrey, Field CISO at Hyperproof and senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It was caused by a flaw in an update of the CrowdStrike software. Yet it cost a wide range of companies, including airlines, public transit, healthcare and financial services, an estimated $5.4 billion.

Another way to thwart cyberattacks is to increase the number of cybersecurity experts, McGladrey says. According to the 2017 cybercrime report from the Herjavec Group, cybersecurity firms estimate such crimes are going to cost about $6 trillion annually by 2021. Companies are experiencing shortages in qualified applicants for cybersecurity jobs. The U.S. Department of Commerce estimates there are now about 350,000 unfilled positions, and that number is only going to increase. McGladrey says.

Understanding the risk to your business requires human intuition. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of things along the path to understanding risk that can’t be improved with automation. At Black Hat, David Spark spoke to Kayne McGladrey, field CISO, Hyperproof, about how having a security-focused company culture can help CISOs link their known risks to their controls in order to put their budget where it will have the most impact. This can allow organizations to operate within the reality that business risk and cyber risk are not separate things. With changing state regulations and rapidly advancing technology, staying on top of your risk in a simple and understandable way is more imperative than ever.

It’s no longer enough to have a Security Information and Even Management (SIEM) system or layer in commercial threat data, deploy a deception system, or prioritize assets–there’s simply no one-size-fits-all security solution. “This is still more art than science,” says Kayne McGladrey (@kaynemcgladrey), a director of security and information technology. “An effective solution needs to incorporate elements of all of those products or solutions to create meaningful and actionable intelligence.”

For years, security budgets seemed to go only one direction: up. As recently as February of this year, some 62% of organizations said they planned to increase their cybersecurity spending for 2020, according research by analyst firm ESG.

But that was then.

Like their C-suite peers, CISOs today are being asked to do more with less – and probably will be for some time, as the world continues in these uncertain economic times.