AI in Cybersecurity: The Good and the Bad

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.”

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.”

The biggest issue with prioritizing software fixes is that there’s often a disconnect between security controls and business risk outcomes, according to Kayne McGladrey, IEEE senior member and field CISO at Hyperproof, a security and risk company. That makes it harder to get executive support, he says. Code maintenance and dependency management aren’t sexy topics. Instead, executive interest tends to focus “on the financial or reputational repercussions of downtime,” McGladrey tells CSO.

“To address this problem, organizations should document and agree upon the business risks associated with both first-party and third-party code. Then they need to determine how much risk they’re willing to accept in areas like reputational damage, financial damage, or legal scrutiny. After there’s executive-level consensus, business owners of critical systems should work to identify and implement controls to reduce those risks,” McGladrey says.

What a delightful surprise! I was nominated and won one of the three “Top Cyber Pro” awards for 2020.

Featured Presentation: “Best practices for cyber security training programs” by Kayne McGladrey, CISSP Employees dread the meeting invitation that reads ‘Annual mandatory cyber security training in the break room at 1 PM Wednesday’. In this presentation, we’ll discuss best practices for creating a reality-based training program that encourages employee participation and builds organizational muscle memory for responding to active threats.

“There’s the cybersecurity threat and then there’s the real threat,” explains Kayne McGladrey, field chief information security officer (CISO) of compliance company Hyperproof, and senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). “A cybersecurity threat is disruption, like when we saw the Russians invade Ukraine as part of their illegal war, they took down Viasat and not by attacking the satellites themselves, instead, they attacked the firmware of satellite modems on the ground.”