Complying with SEC, NFA FINRA Cyber Security Standards Both the SEC, NFA and FINRA have indicated that they will put heavy emphasis on cyber security enforcement throughout 2018. While FINRA is explicit – among other things, it publishes a cyber security checklist and a detailed report on best practices – the SEC’s guidance is far… Read More
Gartner Is Shifting Its Focus Toward IRM, and You Should, Too Over the summer, Gartner announced that it was moving its focus away from GRC and launching a new Magic Quadrant for integrated risk management, or IRM: IRM enables simplification, automation and integration of strategic, operational and IT risk management processes and data. IRM goes… Read More
Uber Breach a Case Study in Awful Cyber and Business Ethics The Uber breach, which compromised the data of 57 million drivers and customers worldwide, has just gone from bad to worse. Not only did the company wait for a year to disclose the hack, it scrambled to cover it up by forking over $100,000… Read More
Data Governance Is at the Core of GDPR Compliance Organizations have until May 25, 2018, to comply with the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Arguably the most comprehensive, far-reaching data privacy law passed to date, the GDPR grants European consumers numerous new data privacy rights and places new data governance responsibilities on organizations.… Read More
Forever 21 Breach Disclosed on the Cusp of the Holiday Shopping Season Clothing retailer Forever 21 suffered a POS system breach in an undisclosed number of stores from March to October 2017, the company announced last week. The Forever 21 breach was discovered by a third party and involved hackers taking advantage of POS systems… Read More
Social Media Security Matters: Just Look at the Trump Twitter Account Debacle The recent Trump Twitter account incident – where the president’s Twitter feed was deactivated for 11 minutes – was fodder for many late-night television jokes. All kidding aside, though, enterprise social media security is serious business. A social media presence is an integral… Read More
FedRAMP Certification Can Help Grow Your Cloud Service Business The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) was designed to support the federal government’s “cloud-first” initiative by making it easier for federal agencies to contract with cloud providers. Like FISMA, DFARS, CJIS, and HIPAA, FedRAMP’s security controls are based on NIST 800-53. If your cloud… Read More
Don’t want your company to be the next Yahoo, Equifax, Deloitte, or SEC? Don’t ignore cyber risk management. October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month in the U.S., which is quite fitting right now, being as barely a day is going by without yet another disclosure of a massive hack, and Americans are far more… Read More
The Equifax breach isn’t the largest data breach, but it is one of the most troubling because of its massive scope, the nature of the information stolen, and the absolutely awful way in which it has been handled. While Hurricane Irma dominated the national news late last week, a man-made disaster unfolded in the background… Read More
HBO has had a rough summer, and things are getting progressively worse for the cable titan. The HBO hacks began in late June, when an individual hacker or group calling themselves “Mr. Smith” dumped several episodes of an upcoming HBO series and the script to an upcoming Game of Thrones episode online. Mr. Smith claimed… Read More
HBO Hack Targeted Valuable Intellectual Property and Company Secrets Corporate espionage and the theft of intellectual property and company secrets have gone cyber. The latest victim is cable network HBO and its flagship series Game of Thrones. The HBO hack, perpetrated by a hacker or group calling themselves “Mr. Smith,” may involve as much as… Read More
Anthem – yes, that Anthem – has been hacked again. About a month after the beleaguered health insurer agreed to fork over a record-setting $115 million to settle a class action lawsuit related to its massive 2015 breach, it was breached again, or rather, one of its third-party vendors was. The 2017 Anthem breach involved… Read More
Verizon, Trump Hotels, and the RNC are Among the Recent Victims of Third-Party Breaches Even if your own cyber security is up to snuff, your organization could be at risk of third-party breaches if your business partners are not as diligent as you are. Verizon just learned this lesson the hard way after one of… Read More
The NotPetya attacks weren’t as bad as WannaCry; they were worse, and we all need to start cooperating to prevent the next attack. It’s looking more and more like last week’s NotPetya malware attacks, which infected computers around the world but hit Ukraine particularly hard, were designed to cause widespread damage and disruption, not make… Read More
The cybersecurity skills gap is real and growing; there simply aren’t enough cybersecurity employees to go around. Cybercrime is rapidly escalating, and boardrooms are taking notice. KPMG’s 2017 U.S. CEO Outlook survey shows cybersecurity risk to be among CEOs’ top concerns, yet only 40% of them feel that their organizations are fully prepared to handle… Read More
White-Hat Hackers Are Already Being Caught in the Cryptocurrency Regulation Net Cryptocurrencies have long been associated with cyber crime. The cryptocurrency Bitcoin was the de facto currency of the notorious online black market Silk Road, it remains the preferred payment method on the Dark Net, and the majority of ransomware attacks, including WannaCry, demand payment… Read More
Cryptocurrency mining malware may end up being a bigger problem than WannaCry Organizations that think they dodged a bullet when their older systems did not fall prey to the WannaCry ransomware may want to think again. Weeks prior to the WannaCry attacks, a group of hackers was taking advantage of the same Windows vulnerabilities that… Read More
The Healthcare Industry Cybersecurity Task Force’s report on healthcare cyber security echoes a similar study on medical device security issued by Synopsys and the Ponemon Institute. On the heels of a damning study by Synopsys and the Ponemon Institute, which provides a blow-by-blow accounting of the many problems with medical device security, a federal task… Read More
Four Important Lessons from the WannaCry Ransomware Attacks The recent WannaCry ransomware attacks put cyber security on the front page of every newspaper in the world. Now, everyone knows what ransomware is and how destructive it can be, but will anything change? Following are four critical lessons that both organizations and individuals should take away… Read More
Why Your Employees Keep Clicking on Phishing Emails, and How You Can Stop It The 2017 Verizon Data Breach Report is out, and it’s full of great news – if you’re a hacker. The study, which examined over 1,900 breaches and more than 42,000 attempts in 84 countries, showed that cyberespionage and ransomware are on… Read More
Hacked Companies Are Facing Data Breach Lawsuits Filed by Financial Institutions Data breaches aren’t cheap to clean up. Just ask Rosen Hotels, whose costs to clean up a 2016 breach could end up exceeding $2.4 million. Shockingly, that’s below the $4 million average cited by IBM. In addition to direct costs, such as fines, labor… Read More
Who should be held responsible when a company’s systems get breached? Historically, the CIO, the CISO, or both have shouldered the lion’s share of data breach responsibility; well over half of security decision-makers expect to lose their jobs if a hack happens at their organizations. However, breaches don’t happen in vacuums, and CIOs and CISOs… Read More
“ClearEnergy” May Have Been Fake News, But Threats Against ICS / SCADA Security Are Quite Real Accusations of “fake news” rocked the cyber security industry last week after infosec provider CRITIFENCE implied that it had detected a brand-new “in the wild” ransomware variant called ClearEnergy that posed a clear and present danger to ICS and… Read More