Time to get serious in 2015

Security professionals are faced with the on-going problem of stakeholders under-estimating the security flaws within their organisation. In most cases this is not the failing of the security team but depending on the market/vertical, teams are faced with budget constraints, redundancies, or most commonly, companies not taking responsibility that Security starts within. This means educating internal staff to take responsibility from the moment they walk into the office; I.e. The devices they bring, the doors that they open to 'guests',  the confidential conversations they have in open areas and the general ethos. Furthermore, there is the responsibility of your key suppliers and other third parties that you share information with. 

You may have all the IT/Cyber security gadgets and resources you need but what are your suppliers doing with that data? Do they share the same vision for security and are they as vigilant as you? How do you measure that in an efficient way and act upon on it?

Then to the other extreme of external threats. It's not if you get attacked it's when...No matter the size of your company, no one can hide from the inevitable. Whether it's protecting your brand/reputation or the time that squeezes on your employee productivity; It's essential to get the right tools in place and resources to understand your vulnerabilities both an internal and external perspective from the top of the stack to the bottom. 

Cyber Security Insurance

Another point to think and debate on, is the stakeholders decision to attempt to defer the risk; the thought process that some of the external threats and losses are covered by Cyber Risk Insurance. Is that an excuse to relax their internal data governance practises? It only takes one of the below for premiums to rocket. It goes back to my point on educating your organisation, understand the threat. You can't mitigate everything but if you turn into a proactive organisation rather than a reactive organisation; you will be in a better position for the ongoing changes in the cyber world. IT/Cyber Security is not a small part of your business - in my opinion it should lie in the core of how your business operates.

Security teams and professionals alike can work with the budgets and tools that they are given. As horrible as it sounds, security breaches are rife and evermore imminent; these attacks are becoming closer to home than we would like. 

Some of the big security breaches we saw in 2014:

• Russian Cyber criminal gang stole 1.2 billion usernames and passwords from 420,000 websites by exploiting SQL injection vulnerabilities in web applications
• Intrusion into JP Morgan Chase’s network and the third-party website that manages its charity race
• Cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment’s infrastructure
• Morrisons Suffers Staff Payroll Data Theft
• Thames Valley Police officer dismissed for selling police information
• Thousands hit in Tesco.com attack
• MoonPig.com - Some 3.6 million customer data leaked
• HeartBleed - undiscovered for more than two years. Attackers could exploit vulnerable versions of the open-source software known as OpenSSL – which runs on millions of web servers – to steal passwords, credit card details, encryption keys and other sensitive data, without leaving any trace.
• Ebay - Hackers managed to seal personal records of 233 million users. The hack took usernames, passwords, phone numbers and physical addresses compromised.

More large scale attacks can be see here at Informationisbeautiful