Congratulations to John "JT" Mendoza, one of our 2019 Most Influential People in Security awardees, who is retiring from federal government service after 22 years. He will be joining CGI as Director of Global Security, primarily responsible for establishing a global insider risk management program.
The National Science Foundation has awarded Georgia State’s Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Research Group (EBCS) nearly $300,000 for a pilot program to teach students advanced cybersecurity research skills and match them with CISOs, with whom they will test tools to improve organizations’ security.
When I speak with candidates who are either leaving government roles or actively looking for a new role, I am often asked what programs or courses related to cybersecurity they could take to improve their marketability.
In recent years, Enterprise Risk Management has become increasingly focused on cybersecurity risks. While this focus on cyber is understandable, the current COVID crisis has demonstrated that the unpredictable nature of cascading risks requires viewing risk through a much wider risk aperture. One way forward to successfully navigate this new risk frontier is the establishment of a Risk Operations Center (ROC). The ROC enables enterprise and technology leaders to have the continuous monitoring they require to proactively mitigate all cyber issues. Additionally, it fully supports the CISO/cybersecurity leader's principal responsibilities identified by the HBR survey.
COVID-19 has completely changed our world from six months ago, as we continue to battle the grave health implications, face extended stay at home orders, and grapple with the insurmountable ramifications on our economy. The pandemic has also forever changed the cyber threat landscape, with our workforce becoming more dispersed, and potentially more vulnerable, than ever as organizations switch out of the confines of their offices and move entire data streams to their laptops and home offices. On top of this, Salesforce has announced it is ending its Data Recovery service on July 31st, which is putting all of the data protection responsibilities, and the dire consequences that comes along with it, on the backs of the customer.
To address this current losing war with cyberattackers, the future of cybersecurity requires augmenting the current focus of “indicators of compromise” with “indicators of exposure & warning” in real-time. Where the measure would be to gauge the shift of incident management that would tilt on managing more incidents at warning stages than on compromise stages. It is imperative to build an AI engine to perform this very task as that would be the only way to perform in real-time, scale with the growing nature of cloud as well as to cover the evolving nature to attack scenarios.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced the addition of two leading cybersecurity experts to support the agency’s COVID-19 response efforts. Josh Corman is joining CISA as a Visiting Researcher, and Rob Arnold will join CISA’s National Risk Management Center as a Senior Cybersecurity and Risk Management Advisor.