Opening keynote speech at the Seattle Electrical Conference

“Choosing the right GRC platform is hard, but knowing what’s most important for you and your organization is key to choosing the right one. Ultimately, what matters most is that you find a platform with all the features listed above that will enable your team to maintain compliance without the headache of manual processes or inflexible legacy solutions.”

CISOs now face substantial personal risks, as seen in cases like Uber and SolarWinds where the SEC has taken legal action against the security chiefs. The primary risk is both personal and professional liability for the CISO, according to Kayne McGladrey, field CISO at Hyperproof. The problem, however, is that boards unaware of the business risks from poor cybersecurity are unlikely to include the CISO in the Directors & Officers insurance policy. “This exposes CISOs to substantial risk,” McGladrey told Cybersecurity Dive.

When it comes to modern technology, everything is a compromise between convenience and security. Everyone wants fast access to the internet, which is why Wi-Fi is everywhere. But how secure is your home Wi-Fi router? What can you do to protect your network? Something you rarely hear these days is that as long as you follow a few common-sense and easily implemented best practices, you probably have very little to worry about.

Kayne McGladrey (@kaynemcgladrey), Security Architect at Ascent Solutions, agrees: “Microsoft 365, for example, allows for automatic classification and labeling of unstructured data, but also permits users to provide a justification when the automation gets it wrong.

“Combined with automated data loss prevention, this can allow a business to easily enforce and report on policies for sharing non-public data both inside and outside of their organization,” he says.

Kayne McGladrey, Field CISO at Hyperproof and IEEE Senior Member, noted that the use of generative AI models in business hinges on their ability to provide accurate information. He cited as examples studies of AI models’ abilities to extract information from documents used for financial sector regulation that are frequently relied on to make investment decisions.

“Right now, the best AI models get 80 percent of the questions right,” McGladrey said. “They hallucinate the other 20 percent of the time. That’s not a good sign if you think you are making investment decisions based on artificial intelligence telling you this is a great strategy four out of five times.”

In recent years, we’ve seen a significant shift in the threats targeting businesses. “Everybody focused on the human harms, people couldn’t check into their hotel rooms; people couldn’t use an ATM… the nature of the technical exploits is not what we focus on in terms of harm… that’s not what we focus on in terms of harm,” states Kayne McGladrey, a field CISO at Hyperproof and senior IEEE member. This reiterates the transition from mere inconvenience to significant operational disruptions and economic consequences that cyber threats now pose.