InfoSec Pros: Carmen Marsh and Confidence Staveley

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.

You have a remarkable economic incentive for threat actors to do their job. Unlike a fire, threat actors innovate. There’s not some new way we’re going to have a fire. I guarantee you by the end of the week, we’re going to have a dozen new ways for threat actors to do their jobs.

“There’s not a one-size-fits-all approach to securing healthcare,” McGladrey said. “All organizations are doing the best they can, working hard against insurmountable odds. It’s important to respect and understand not where they are relative to the standard, but how they’ve improved over time.”

Do you feel like you are overwhelmed trying to run your business while defending against the latest cyber threats? Join Kayne McGladrey, speaker, author and Director of Information Security Services for Integral Partners (http://www.ipllc.co) for our upcoming presentation on taking a proactive, risk-oriented approach to cyber security for individual consultants and small businesses.

Kayne will discuss:

– Why you should manage risks based on user identity instead of chasing the latest threats

– How individual consultants can protect themselves

– A vendor-neutral reference architecture for cyber security at small businesses

We will have time for Q&A at the end of the presentation.

In 2010, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published the report “A Human Capital Crisis in Cybersecurity,” which noted “there are about 1,000 security people in the US who have the specialized security skills to operate effectively in cyberspace. We need 10,000 to 30,000.” Twelve years later, the Cyberspace Solarium Commission 2.0 Workforce Development Agenda for the National Cyber Director observed that “in the United States, there are almost 600,000 open cybersecurity jobs across the private sector and federal, state, and local governments — a remarkable gap considering that the field currently employs just over a million professionals.” This is not an encouraging trend.

AI can also help improve retention rates by making entry-level cybersecurity jobs “less dull,” says Kayne McGladrey, CISO and CIO of Pensar and a member of the IEEE. “We get people out of school, and they are excited to be on the team. Then, on their first day, they’re handed a checklist: here’s the things you will do and the order in which you will do them.”