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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

“The monetization and weaponization of digital threats was comparably new when the critical infrastructure components that manage our modern world were being designed for reliability a decade or two ago,” said IEEE Senior Member Kayne McGladrey. McGladrey says that it’s time consuming to patch security flaws in many of these older components, some of which were designed to run uninterrupted for decades.

“We can anticipate that any nation-state with a propaganda department or agency is working to right-size their capabilities to spread disinformation.” It’s especially true, he adds, among nation-states with larger budgetary allocations since they can use automation and “office employees” to distribute the narratives.