cybersecurity

“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“As part of the purchasing cycle they’re replacing outdated infrastructure with infrastructure as a service,” he said.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

You receive a text message or an email notification from your mobile carrier about an account change you didn’t make and, thirty minutes later, your cell phone has no signal, even after a reboot. You can’t log into your email. You’re locked out of your bank account.

In the past few years, security researchers and advanced persistent threat actors have demonstrated attacks on the BIOS, said Kayne McGladrey, IEEE member and director of security and IT at Seattle-based Pensar Development.

These rare attacks can provide a persistent and hidden bridgehead into an enterprise network, McGladrey said.

An organization that doesn’t understand or appreciate security won’t be able to adequately identify and prioritize risk, nor articulate its tolerance for those risks based on business goals and objectives, 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).

“The CIO won’t see the business impact if there’s not a culture of risk mitigation,” McGladrey says. “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.”

Sharing information about threats can help boost overall cybersecurity by alerting others to those risks, as well as providing successful ways to counteract them, said Kayne McGladrey, national cybersecurity expert, director of security and information technology for Pensar Development, and member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

“They could actually see a reduction in those threats that are commodity threats — threats that are crimes of opportunity [vs. targeted attacks],” he said.

“If the end user logs on from Seattle, where their mobile phone and laptop is, a connection from New York would be unusual,” McGladrey explained. “It is also possible to note the typing style and speed of a user and use that biometric signature to determine if the user is legitimate. These data [points] make it more difficult for a threat actor to operate silently in the environment.”