Guest Blog Post

GUEST ESSAY: Cyber insurance 101 — for any business operating in today’s digital environment

By Cynthia Lopez Olson

Cyberattacks are becoming more prevalent, and their effects are becoming more disastrous. To help mitigate the risk of financial losses, more companies are turning to cyber insurance.

Related: Bots attack business logic

Cyber insurance, like other forms of business insurance, is a way for companies to transfer some of numerous potential liability hits associated specifically with IT infrastructure and IT activities.

These risks are normally not covered by a general liability policy, which includes coverage only for injuries and property damage. In general, cyber insurance covers things like:

•Legal fees and expenses to deal with a cybersecurity incident

•Regular security audit

•Post-attack public relations

•Breach notifications

•Credit monitoring

•Expenses involved in investigating the attack

•Bounties for cyber criminals

In short, cyber insurance covers many of the expenses that you’d typically face in the wake of cybersecurity event.

GUEST ESSAY: When cyber risks rise in 2020, as they surely will, don’t overlook physical security

By Vidya Muthukrishnan

Physical security is the protection of personnel and IT infrastructure (such as hardware, software, and data) from physical actions and events that could cause severe damage to an organization. This includes protection from natural disasters, theft, vandalism, and terrorism.

Related: Good to know about IoT

Physical security is often a second thought when it comes to information security. Despite this, physical security must be implemented correctly to prevent attackers from gaining physical access and taking whatever they desire.

This could include expensive hardware, or access to sensitive user and/or enterprise security information. All the encryption, firewalls, cryptography, SCADA systems, and other IT security measures would be useless if that were to occur.

Traditional examples of physical security include junction boxes, feeder pillars, and CCTV security cameras. But the challenges of implementing physical security are much more problematic than they were previously. Laptops, USB drives, and smartphones can all store sensitive data that can be stolen or lost. Organizations have the daunting task of trying to safeguard data and equipment that may contain sensitive information about users.

GUEST ESSAY: Addressing DNS, domain names and Certificates to improve security postures

By Vincent D’Angelo

In 2019, we’ve seen a surge in domain name service (DNS) hijacking attempts and have relayed warnings from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, U.K.’s Cybersecurity Centre, ICANN, and other notable security experts. Although, the topic has gained popularity amongst CIOs and CISOs, most companies are still overlooking important security blind spots when it comes to securing their digital assets outside the enterprise firewalls—domains, DNS, digital certificates.

In fact, most organizations, regardless of geographic location or industry, are exposed to these risks. Our most recent Domain Name Security report featuring insights from the defense, media, and financial sectors illustrates the risk trends.

•Do you know who your domain name registrar is (the domain name management company that holds the keys to the kingdom)?

•What do you know about your domain name registrar’s controls, security, policies and processes?

I like to think of this topic like the electricity that powers our homes. Everyone expects their lights to work, but then, what happens when the power goes out? In the enterprise environment, domain names, DNS, and certificates are the lifeline to any internet-based application including websites, email, apps, virtual private networks (VPNs), voice over IP (VoIP) and more.

GUEST ESSAY: The ethical considerations of personal privacy viewed as a human right

By Dean Chester

It ought to be clear to everyone that personal privacy should be a human right and not a commodity to be bought and sold.

Alas, we can’t take it for granted: data breaches put us under fire constantly, revealing everything about us from logs and passwords to medical data.

The recent Suprema data breach, for example, exposed such sensitive data as fingerprints, facial recognition, and clearance level information of as many as 28 million employees worldwide. This number is so high that it’s difficult to even imagine the consequences of it.

Luckily for us, there are ways to protect our private info, at least to some extent. But there seems to be an underlying problem in these possibilities.

The question of ethics

Yes, what we should ask is how ethical it is to even charge for upholding one’s privacy? It is true that there are cheap VPN services and even free ones. Isn’t it great to be able to hide your traffic by encrypting it for free?

But as it always is the case with free services, those that aren’t paid make you their product by limiting your speed and traffic, showing you ads, and – what a surprise – selling your private data to third parties.

Inexpensive services may not seek to profit off of you, but the question of ethics still stands. Is a right you have to pay for a right or is it a privilege?

It may be argued that it costs money to keep a virtual private network going, and it’s a good argument. This article, however, is not meant to be a jab at honest VPN providers. Obviously, what they do is logical and they can’t be blamed for it. There’s a market for the services they provide and they try to keep the fees low.

It is the situation creating this market that is unhealthy. And as long as it doesn’t change, … more

GUEST ESSAY: Why the next round of cyber attacks could put many SMBs out of business

By Steve Akridge

In the last year, the news media has been full of stories about vicious cyber breaches on municipal governments. From Atlanta to Baltimore to school districts in Louisiana, cyber criminals have launched a wave of ransomware attacks on governments across the country.

As city governments struggle to recover access to their data, hackers are already turning their sites on their next targets: small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

A 2018 study by the Ponemon Institute showed that 67 percent of SMBs experienced a cyber attack. Even worse, according to Ponemon, 47 percent of SMBs said they have no understanding of how to protect their companies from cyberattacks.

Most small and medium-sized organizations are highly vulnerable to cyberattacks because they usually don’t have a sufficiently strong information technology infrastructure, limited internal staff, or can’t afford to external consultants to handle data security.

When you realize that 54 percent of organizations that suffer an attack spend about $500,000 to restore their systems and 62 percent of SMBs close their doors after an attack, the damage to the economy becomes very apparent.

New SMB security solution

Unfortunately, most cybersecurity firms focus their attention on large organizations and corporations that can afford to pay their fees – leaving SMBs even more vulnerable to potential cyber criminals. While large corporations can get cyber security insurance and engage legions of consultants, the question is:

Comment | Read | August 12th, 2019 | For technologists | Guest Blog Post

GUEST ESSAY: 6 unexpected ways that a cyber attack can negatively impact your business

By Mike James

Cyber crime can be extremely financially damaging to businesses. However, if you believe that money is the only thing that a cyber-attack costs your organization, you would be wrong. In fact, a recent academic analysis identified 57 specific individual negative factors that result from a cyber-attack against a business. Here are six ways, worth considering, that a attack can affect your organization.

SEO rankings

There are a number of issues that will occur in the aftermath of a cyber-attack that can have enormously negative consequences for your search engine optimisation (SEO). Hacked sites, for example, will by flagged in the rankings with a warning sign which can put off visitors. It is also worth noting that when a site is hacked it can start receiving bad reviews on Google’s review section – these can both begin to see you dropping in the rankings and losing traffic.

A large number of sites also have their content altered when they suffer a breach, and given the importance of content to the way that your site ranks, this can clearly play a huge role.

Legal and compliance issues

It is not just cyber-criminals that you have to worry about when you are calculating the costs of a cyber-attack. In the modern world of data protection and industry regulators, there are now powers to heavily fine businesses that fail to take adequate steps to protect their customers.

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for example, regulators now have the power to fine businesses up to €20 million or 4 per cent of annual global turnover (whichever is greater), if they suffer a data breach and have failed to be in compliance with the regulation. This shows you just have expensive the concept is.

GUEST ESSAY: The story behind how DataTribe is helping to seed ‘Cybersecurity Valley’ in Maryland

By Steve Kaufman

There’s oil in the state of Maryland – “cyber oil.”

With the largest concentration of cybersecurity expertise –– the “oil” — in the world, Maryland is fast changing from the Old Line State into “Cybersecurity Valley.”

That’s because Maryland is home to more than 40 government agencies with extensive cyber programs, including the National Security Agency, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Defense Information Systems Agency, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, USCYBERCOM, NASA and the Department of Defense’s Cyber Crime Center. Within these government labs and agencies, taking place is a groundswell of innovation in deep technology cyber disciplines to the tune of billions of dollars annually over the past three decades.

In addition, the state is home to 16 nationally designated cybersecurity Centers of Excellence and a state university and college system that graduates more cyber-degreed engineers than any other state. The state counts approximately 109,000 cyber engineers.

Not only does the advanced development at these government agencies contribute to the success of cybersecurity in the state, but also so do many Maryland-based cybersecurity companies. Two notable examples are Sourcefire, acquired by Cisco for $2.7B and Tenable, which went public in 2018 with a market capitalization of approximately $4 billion.

Maryland and environs, including Virginia and Washington D.C., has also attracted a powerful and growing flow of venture capital to the region – about $1 Billion in 2018 and growing at an incredible pace.

Such bona fides led to the inaugural private “by invitation” Global Cyber Innovation Summit (GCIS) in Baltimore in May 2019. GCIS was a Davos-level conference with no vendors and no selling, where scores of chief security information officers (CISOs), top CEO’s, industry and government thought leaders and leading innovators discussed the myriad challenges in and around cybersecurity and possible solutions in today’s environment.

All this represents the early phases of a foundation-building process that is on track … more

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