Author: Kayne

Over the past year and a half, school administrators, teachers, and IT support staff and students themselves have been working in a complex threat environment. The pandemic and major increase in cyberattacks has resulted in closures for both in-person and online schools. While this will only continue into 2022, it will be importance for security and IT professionals that support schools to align their policies, procedures, and technical controls to a cybersecurity framework that fits the needs of their organization, such as the recently announced K-12 resources announced jointly by the FBI and CISA. Using a formal framework can help schools effectively identify and mitigate gaps in school security postures without substantial budget increases. Schools should also consider a quarterly exercise to re-audit their password stores, as the number of compromised passwords will only continue to increase in the year ahead. A password that was secure three months ago may have appeared in a data breach (especially since students and adults tend to use the same passwords for multiple accounts) and may no longer be a secure option. Although it’s hard to predict what’s to come for educational institutions moving forward and future of remote and hybrid learning is going to be uncertain, education professionals should expect to see threat actors continue to target schools that have not taken a proactive approach to cybersecurity and deployed the appropriate defenses.

Adopting zero trust strategies are a potential solution to mitigate the challenges of ransomware, bulk intelligence data collection, and technical threats to cryptocurrency. As zero trust is predicated on a continuous authentication of user and device identities based on prior known-good behaviors, unusual events from previously unknown devices will be far less frequent and the telemetry far more obvious for investigation by blue teams.

Global supply chains have been under intense strain in recent months, a situation that has been made even worse by the growth of cyber attacks, especially in the form of ransomware. The transportation sector, which has been largely deregulated, needs to adopt recommendations by industry and government organizations for implementing measures that they might have overlooked in years. The price of failing to do so can be high, with ransomware attacks threatening to shut down critical logistics operations for days or even longer.

Large-scale cyber attacks will continue to pose a substantial risk to companies, individuals and economies in 2022. Several factors contribute to this trend, and unfortunately, policies and technical responses have yet to reduce the frequency and impact of cyber attacks.

“Organizational collaboration is difficult when different data protection tools perform similar functions, as it may be unclear how to allow a collaborator to access or modify data. Something as simple as data classification and labeling becomes overly complex and a nuisance to end users if they need to set a label in multiple locations, particularly when the labels are not consistent across tools.”

“The future of work is not what we were collectively promised in the days before the pandemic. Despite being nearly two years into the global pandemic, organizations are still in the process of redefining how their offices should be used now and in the future, which has lead to a surge in the adoption of smart, digital technologies.”

Kayne McGladrey, an advisory board member for the Technology Alliance Group NW and cybersecurity strategist for the firm Ascent Solutions, says once the incident is resolved, Sinclair “should do an internal hot-wash” to identify lessons learned – allowing them to strengthen technical defenses and update/validate their incident response plan.

There are three best practices that security professionals supporting schools can follow to help make the school year uneventful in their district: defending user identities, patching endpoints, and running quarterly tabletop exercises.

“This will vary by industry and size of business,” notes Kayne McGladrey, cybersecurity strategist at Ascent Solutions. “A social media company losing control of their content for an hour has a very different risk profile than a manufacturing company being unable to manufacture products.”

Kayne McGladrey, an advisory board member for the Technology Alliance Group NW and cybersecurity strategist for the firm Ascent Solutions, tells ISMG, “These [various legislative efforts] all stem from the issue that there is no single source of truth on the volume or scope of cyberattacks, which has led to the perception that it is difficult to apply commensurate public and private policy responses.”

“As part of the great resignation of 2021, we’ve seen an increasingly fragmented view of intellectual property on the part of departing employees. Businesses can reduce the substantial risk associated with data exfiltration of trade secrets, regulated data and other sensitive data by deploying and monitoring DLP across the enterprise, including remote endpoints.” — IEEE Senior Member Kayne McGladrey