cybersecurity

“Viruses are most commonly spread through phishing, which is a technique of sending emails designed to prey on a person’s emotions to make them click a link or open a malicious attachment,” says Kayne McGladrey IEEE member and director of security and IT for Pensar Development. “Besides running up-to-date commercial antivirus software, the easiest way to avoid viruses is to pause before acting on messages. Get a cup of coffee, or at least get up and stretch, before deciding if the email is trying to manipulate your emotions through a sense of authority (someone impersonating your boss or a police officer), a sense of urgency (because of an artificial time constraint), or scarcity (supplies are limited, act now).” These are the same psychological techniques used by con artists since time immemorial, with the only difference being that con artists had to con one person at a time. “With email, social media, and text messages, threat actors can con thousands of people. No antivirus software is perfect, but pausing before acting can stop most of today’s viruses.”

The workforce of tomorrow still will be technically savvy, well-versed in machine learning and data science. Advanced machine learning skills will be important, but Kayne McGladrey (@kaynemcgladrey), Director of Security and Information Technology at Pensar Development, recommended that those looking for future employment also consider learning a programming language.

“The intent here is not to master it,” McGladrey explained, “but rather to gain an understanding and appreciation of how things work from the inside out. Employers are also looking for career stability so that they can invest in their people, so don’t hop from company to company on an annual basis.”

Join host James Azar and me as we talk about workforce development, diversity, the Internet of Things, and the role of government in technology.

The overwhelming majority of IoT devices on the market are hot garbage that do not follow security best practices. Allowing consumers to use passwords that have appeared in breaches before makes it easy for threat actors to gain persistence on devices. Devices with no update mechanism means IoT devices become a perpetual threat once the first vulnerability is found. Most people have no way of knowing that their IoT sensor needs an update, so it’s unrealistic to shift the responsibility of software updates to consumers.

“It’s low effort for them. Once they set up the subscription and unless the subscription is canceled, they don’t have to do any other work and they can resell access to that subscription,” he said. “So it’s a guaranteed line of profit for them until somebody goes and notices there’s been a problem.”

Criminals typically resell access to the services on secondary markets, McGladrey said. Criminals may resell a streaming service that’s normally $10 per month for $5, netting the thieves $5 monthly. While a single crime is not that profitable, there have been cases where groups have reaped millions of dollars by charging small amounts to hundreds of thousands of consumers, he said.

Kayne McGladrey (@kaynemcgladrey), Director of Security and Information Technology at Pensar Development, observed that IT leaders are recognizing that building and operating on-premises servers is not a competitive advantage.

“As part of the purchasing cycle they’re replacing outdated infrastructure with infrastructure as a service,” he said. “This gradual transition to the cloud lowers risks and makes disaster recovery simpler and more reliable than in past years. This strategy also significantly lowers the threats of a physical site compromise by threat actors.”

Full video of my presentation on Managing the Risks of the Future Internet of Things at the 2019 IEEE VICS in San Diego, CA.

Companies should pay special attention to consistent classification and labeling of data, as it’s one of the biggest hurdles to effective data governance. Setting default labels for new data (for example, dubbing them confidential) can ensure that policies and technical controls are applied consistently across the organization. This also frees up data creators from having to manually label all newly created information. “In that way, a data steward only needs to review data labels when that data is crossing a security barrier such as preparing a file to send to a client or third-party vendor,” notes Kayne McGladrey (@kaynemcgladrey), director of security and information technology at Pensar Development.

“The CIO won’t see the business impact if there’s not a culture of risk mitigation,” says Kayne McGladrey, director of security and IT for Pensar Development and a member of the professional association IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).

“A culture where security is seen as someone else’s problem will derail any conversation around security, so the biggest thing for CISOs is to make the conversation with CIOs around risk – not around technologies or shiny objects but around risks to the business.”

My slides from the 2019 IEEE Vision Innovation Challenges Summit