Ransomware – a cyberattack in which attackers hijack computer systems and demand payment to release them – has skyrocketed from a relative rarity a few years ago to the single biggest type of cybercrime today. And there is no end in sight to its growth trajectory. Last year, 2,354 American government entities, healthcare organizations and schools were the victims of ransomware attacks. The average ransomware payout swelled to $178,000 in the first half of 2020, up from $112,000 a year ago, according to ransomware incident response firm Coveware, and few clandestine culprits were caught.
Now that we’ve learned this dependency on the cloud will continue to grow, there are new challenges that organizations have to solve in the year ahead – starting with making these cloud infrastructures more secure. To do this, organizations must reroute the security perimeter to focus on identity. While cloud-based identity can be a complicated concept for a number of reasons, there are a few simple steps organizations can take to evolve their identity access management (IAM) strategies. By moving beyond “effective permissions,” they should instead focus on threats and risks, following a cloud IAM lifecycle approach.
Emergency operations centers (EOCs) are critical decision-making environments. It is vital that these centers have effective, reliable, intuitive technology to allow organizations to collate and interpret data, as well as plan and execute an appropriate emergency response to situations that can pose a danger to life, often with multi-agency involvement. So, when carrying out systems integration in an EOC space where the stakes are so high, how do you ensure you make the correct technology choices? Jon Litt, Senior Manager, Business Development, Government Solutions (US) at Christie highlights how the mission of the EOC is the number one factor to keep in mind.
With increasingly sophisticated attacks on targets of opportunity, how can enterprises ensure they are doing everything possible to safeguard against cyber threats? Surprisingly, we can apply techniques used to fend off enemies throughout ancient history by emperors, warriors, and soldiers to our high-tech environments of today. Below, we’ll examine three civilizations’ decision making and how we can integrate their best practices into modern-day security strategies.
Security magazine launched its inaugural Top Cybersecurity Leaders program for 2021. Security partnered with (ISC)², the world’s leading cybersecurity professional organization, to find enterprise information security executives who have made and continue to make significant contributions in the cybersecurity space to their organizations and the security profession.
Security magazine is pleased to present our inaugural Top Cybersecurity Leaders for 2021. Security partnered with (ISC)², the world’s leading cybersecurity professional organization, to find enterprise information security executives who have made and continue to make significant contributions in the cybersecurity space to their organizations and the security profession. They were nominated by their colleagues and associates, and were chosen based upon their leadership qualities and the overall positive impact that their cybersecurity projects, programs or departments have had on their shareholders, organizations, colleagues and the general public.
Someone of a cynical persuasion may think it was only a matter of time until ‘outsourcing’ came to the cybercrime business. While this inevitability may be debatable, the early success of the model certainly isn’t.
With additional pandemic-related vulnerabilities, these preventable mistakes led to greater losses, and the resulting breaches were often wholly avoidable with simple fixes. Here are four of the most common gaps in security, the high-profile breaches they caused in 2020, and how to prevent your company from becoming the next victim.
As a result of major cyberattacks in 2020, security leaders were forced to be even more cognizant of their approach to protecting their organization, often forcing them to refine and future proof their approaches to this new world of security. After watching the events of 2020 and analyzing threat actors’ approaches, here’s what I expect to see in 2021:
Contact center call volumes will vary from industry to industry and from month to month, but the general trend is steeply upward. Adding new agents isn’t the only or even the most efficient way that contact center managers can respond to the great COVID crunch of 2021. A properly deployed Interactive Voice Response system can make workloads manageable for agents while keeping customers from long and frustrating minutes on hold. Still, new options for callers may correspond to new opportunities for attackers.