“I think we’re going to have an unprecedented number of breaches being announced following the pandemic,” said Kayne McGladrey, member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Communications are critical for an organization when an incident occurs. Leadership must effectively share information with the workforce. For some organizations, this requires enacting the critical communications plan that has been drilled. For others, an incident is a disruption to the normal course of business, which is where business continuity planning demonstrates its value to the organization.
Because of the noise-to-signal ratio, network security is particularly challenging for colleges and universities, says Kayne McGladrey, CISO and CIO of Pensar Development and member of the technology industry group IEEE.
“Every university has a whole crop of new individuals who come into the organization on an annual or quarterly basis,” McGladrey explains. With such a frequent influx of new arrivals bringing their own devices and computers, it’s essentially impossible for university IT teams to control the sheer number of new endpoints. AI can identify networking traffic, assess what “normal” looks like on a university network and do it at a larger scale that humans can accomplish. Thus, if a “faculty member normally arrives at 8 a.m., does work until 7 p.m. and then maybe logs on to her email at 9 p.m., you wouldn’t expect that individual to be up at 3 a.m. connecting from China. AI can monitor those patterns of normalcy,” he says.
To get a sober assessment, we invited Pensar CISO and IEEE member Kayne McGladrey, CISSP into the studio to talk about the variety of risks that remote working introduces. There are some new risks that companies need to account for: from remote access bottlenecks to prying eyes in insecure home offices to insecure home workstations.
Like many CISOs, I don’t sleep much; in my case, getting by on five to six hours of sleep a night is hereditary. Although the tracker collected detailed telemetry, the app only provided comparative reports against other people. Despite my experience, the app alarmingly claimed I’d been having terrible problems sleeping for weeks in a row.
Producing highly accurate reports without individual customization is a consistent design flaw of many cyber security solutions available today.
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.
Compliance is often viewed as a reaction for organizations. The auditing of compliance becomes the event that is anticipated with resources and preparation aligned to culminate in the audit itself. A famous approach used in product development is that launch is a process, not an event. The spirit of that message is important for security leaders to consider in building a sustainable business case for compliance. Compliance should be viewed as a continuous, organizational process.
At the end of January 2020, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) approved the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) with plans to apply this new standard to up to 3,000 subcontractors by the end of 2020. How does this apply to your organization?
Fraud isn’t new, but the internet has provided hackers with the capabilities to easily use the threat vector to trick employees into providing access to their enterprises. Cyberfraud attacks, often distributed via phishing or spear-phishing campaigns, consistently plague and sometimes even completely disable enterprises. Despite the growing number of technologies available to detect and prevent such social engineering attacks from being successful, the weakest link remains human error — be it negligence, maliciousness or apathy. Here, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers member Kayne McGladrey describes the types of cyberfraud attacks enterprises will inevitably face, from credential harvesting to typosquatting attacks. He also offers best practices for creating and instituting a cybersecurity awareness program to prevent employees from falling victim to such threats.
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.
“The effectiveness of AI solutions this year can be measured via the time-to-discovery metric, which measures how long it takes an organization to detect a breach,” says Kayne McGladrey (@kaynemcgladrey), CISO, Pensar Development. “Reducing time to discovery can be achieved through AI’s tenacity, which doesn’t need holidays, coffee breaks, or sleep, which is unlike Tier 1 security operations center analysts who also get bored reading endless log files and alerts.”
“Human resources, in a lot of organizations, has become a regulatory control function and inhibits hiring because of its focus on certifications,” McGladrey says. This is partly why it’s difficult for blue teamers to jump to the red team, a process that “looks to be an insurmountable and very difficult series of certifications,” he points out.