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As the head of information security for a technology company with more than a thousand (now mostly-remote) employees, the COVID-19 pandemic has been — among other adjectives — an educational experience. And while it hasn’t been completely smooth sailing, I believe one of the reasons we were able to transition so quickly to remote work with relatively few hiccups is that we established practices to withstand precisely this type of scenario long before the virus swept through our community. 

Get to know James Carder, CSO at LogRhythm, who has more than 19 years of experience working in corporate IT security and consulting for the Fortune 500 and U.S. Government. At LogRhythm, he develops and maintains the company’s security governance model and risk strategies; protects the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information assets; and oversees both threat and vulnerability management as well as the security operations center (SOC). Carder previously led criminal and national security related investigations at the city, state and federal levels, including those involving the theft of credit card information and Advanced Persistent Threats (APT).

As consumers increasingly turn to online shopping for essential and non-essential goods while at home, fraudsters have adapted their technique to use more sophisticated tactics against consumers, banks and merchants.

In the wake of the Court of Justice of the European Union’s Schrems II judgment, on July 23, 2020, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) adopted a Frequently Asked Questions document to “provide initial clarification and give preliminary guidance to stakeholders on the use of legal instruments for the transfer of personal data to third countries, including the U.S.” The EDPB stated that the document will be updated, and further guidance provided, as it continues to examine and consider the judgment. The six-page FAQs provides the following guidance.

Zero Trust model creator John Kindervag puts it like this: “The point of Zero Trust is not to make networks, clouds, or endpoints more trusted; it's to eliminate the concept of trust from digital systems altogether.” He came up with the model in 2010, at a time when many businesses were just beginning to put foundational cybersecurity controls in place and over-relied on the assumed security inside their enterprise-owned network boundaries.

With telecommuting here to stay, now is the perfect time to re-examine just how much network access you are giving your users and machines. You might be shocked to see how open your network really is. Most organizations allow more access than their users or machines will ever need or should ever have – this excessive trust is what allows attackers who get into the network to spread and cause a lot of damage.

Honeypots were the first form of deception technology. IT security researchers started using them in the 1990s, with the intent to deceive malicious actors who had made it onto the network into interacting with a false system. In this way, honeypots could gather and assess the behavior of the malicious actors. They were not created for threat detection. However, things have changed a great deal in the years since honeypots were created – including deception technology.

Security has been and always will be important to humans. At the deepest level, all humans have an innate desire for security and protection and this desire now extends to our digital footprint.