Daily Tech Digest - December 04, 2022

How Your Organization Can Enhance Its Cybersecurity Posture

You need to be prepared for the worst-case scenario. Most organizations are unaware that they have been breached until their data is held to ransom or has been publicly exposed According to the Information Commissioners Office, "you must report a notifiable breach to the ICO without undue delay, but not later than 72 hours after becoming aware of it. If you take longer than this, you must give reasons for the delay." After you have made the report, how do you go forward on securing the rest of your business? And do you know what steps can be used to lessen the damage done? Controlling the users, logs and security is essential. "This is especially true when regarding data protection and information security. Even more so when this data concerns the handing of financial, personal and/or client-sensitive information," SecurityHQ says. ... How often do you do security testing, and what types of security testing do you do? Do you conduct simulated phishing attacks? Do you have vulnerability management in place? Do you know how secure your firewalls are? Do you conduct red team exercises?


Brooklyn Hospitals Decried for Silence on Cyber Incident

Errol Weiss, chief security officer at the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center, says a lack of transparency by healthcare organizations dealing with ransomware incidents is a common problem. "Despite being a member of an ISAC, we still see organizations reluctant to share attack details when they are a victim of a cyber incident," he says. Senior leaders at those organizations may not trust the anonymity and trust built into information-sharing processes and may be concerned about further exposure and negative reputational impact from unauthorized disclosures, he says. "Given our incredibly litigious society, internal counsel at the impacted organization may also recommend against disclosure outside the company because it could possibly be used against the firm in future litigation," he says. Many organizations do not realize that they have liability protections involving cyber information sharing under the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, he says. "We just need the government and society to create a culture that rewards sharing and does not punish the victim."


8 things to consider amid cybersecurity vendor layoffs

Layoffs of engineers and developers should be the most concerning for CISOs and security teams, Burn adds, describing them as the “canary in the coalmine” when it comes to spotting and fixing security threats. “Often, when we see some of these early layoffs, they impact recruitment or marketing staff, but that shouldn’t concern you really.” However, if you’re looking on LinkedIn and seeing engineers or developers being laid off, that should give you pause for thought, Burn says. Dickson concurs, adding that sales or marketing cuts are unlikely to affect the ability to get security value from the vendor, but cuts to key service or engineering staff could well do just that. For Thacker, the biggest risks to customers would come from a reduction in DevSecOps staffing, “which would potentially bring about a reduction in security oversight, feature updates, and even impact upon the general availability of the service,” while Yuval Wollman, chief cyber officer and managing director of UST, thinks cuts to innovation and research staff could have a direct impact on a product’s efficiency and reliability as the threat landscape evolves and changes.


Is AI moving too fast for ethics? | The AI Beat

The Stable Diffusion news nearly drowned out the applause and chatter of the previous two days, which was all around Meta’s latest AI research announcement about Cicero, an AI agent that masters the difficult and popular strategy game Diplomacy — showing off the machine’s ability to master negotiation, persuasion and cooperation with humans. In a paper published last week in Science, Cicero is said to have ranked in the top 10 percent of players in an online Diplomacy league and achieved more than double the average score of the human players — by combining language models with strategic reasoning. Even AI critics like Gary Marcus found plenty to cheer about regarding Cicero’s prowess: “Cicero is in many ways a marvel,” he said. “It has achieved by far the deepest and most extensive integration of language and action in a dynamic world of any AI system built to date. It has also succeeded in carrying out complex interactions with humans of a form not previously seen.”


Talent development: 4 upskilling success stories

Career development is a focus for all employees, even entry-level workers, and everyone is given several opportunities to grow their skills and learn new technologies. For example, an entry-level code developer at Altria will be thrown into highly technical work right away, so they gain experience fast. And then throughout their first five to six years with the company, they will be moved around IT departments to work on different projects, gaining more experience and potentially finding out what they’re most passionate about. “In many cases, we’re trying to put them into a role that ultimately is going to make them sweat — it’s going to really challenge them,” says Dan Cornell, vice president and CIO of Altria Group. Employees also go through an annual talent planning review process to assess where they are in their careers, what they aspire to within the organization, and how they want to shape their career moving forward. Managers can identify areas for growth, what skills can be developed, opportunities for training, and potential experiences in other departments they might benefit from.


The Metaverse Could Become a Top Avenue for Cyberattacks in 2023

Privacy will emerge as a major concern in the metaverse, Kaspersky predicted. "As the metaverse experience is universal and does not obey regional data protection laws, such as GDPR, this might create complex conflicts between the requirements of the regulations regarding data breach notification," Kaspersky said. Others have also expressed concern over the increased amount of personal information that will be collected in fully immersive environments via VR headsets and their collection of cameras, microphones, and motion trackers. Many expect the data will reveal a lot about a user's location, appearance, and other private information while also enabling attackers to carry out more sophisticated phishing and social engineering scams. At least some of the attacks in virtual reality and augmented reality environments will involve virtual abuse and sexual assault — such as that involving cases of avatar rape, Kaspersky said. The security vendor pointed to an incident where an avatar associated with a researcher at a nonprofit advocacy group was raped on a metaverse platform owned by Meta as one example of the kind of issues consumers can increasingly run into.


Why Change Management Skills Are Essential To Data-Driven Success

A simple way of looking at change management is to view it as a set of people-related strategies and tactics that can help shift behaviors and mindsets. It’s an essential skill set for everyone who works with data from the Chief Data Officer (CDO) down to junior analysts. Data leaders will be primarily focused on cultural and procedural resistance, whereas analysts may only deal with decisional resistance. The scope will differ across roles, but everyone plays a valuable part in the transformative process. Change management is a deep, multi-faceted subject, and there is a vast body of work on the topic. ... To build momentum with your data initiatives, it’s important to deliver quick wins. Rather than waiting for a long-term payoff, potential skeptics or detractors need to see faster returns. When people get a taste of what’s possible through real-world improvements, it becomes easier for them to envision what the future state with data looks like and get on board with the changes.


5 top qualities you need to become a next-gen CISO

Next-gen CISOs are charismatic, innovative, well-connected, and well-respected individuals across the organization and the security industry. They never waste an opportunity to show the value information security brings to the business. They are increasingly creating reporting structures outside of IT to emphasize their independence. Next-gen CISOs regularly participate in industry events and often share their experiences across social media as well as broadcast and print media, helping to further their reputation and influence.Understands the business, earns trust, and practices empathy Next-gen CISOs need to understand the business context behind day-to-day challenges faced by employees, without which they cannot make the right security decisions. They should help build employee, customer, partner, and business stakeholder trust through regular engagement and collaboration. CISOs must shed their ivory tower mentality and build bridges with those departments and managers known to be critical of information security. 


From capex to opex: Storage procurement options bloom

What we are seeing among storage suppliers is the emergence of consumption models of purchasing for on-site capacity that mirror the ways we buy cloud services. Cloud – in the sense of services delivered remotely – is not always suited to the ways customers work. Some avoid the cloud for reasons of performance, compliance, or risk to security or availability. And so, although true pay-as-you-go storage may have its roots in the cloud, there are now on-site options that bring the same levels of flexibility. These can range from opex-based consumption models in which the hardware remains the supplier’s property and customers pay only for the capacity they use, to fully owned capex spend but where hardware upgrades, as required, are built in. At the opex end of things, customers usually commit to base levels of usage, while upgrades to storage and controller hardware are delivered as required. At the capex end of the spectrum, customers can purchase storage hardware outright. But here, some suppliers now offer the option to buy the hardware while still benefiting from upgrades to storage hardware, with monitoring and predictive analytics.


Event-driven automation: How to build an event-driven automation architecture

In addition to the events topic, we also have a few other messaging pipelines handled by AMQ (create the task, invoke automation and automation results listener). Each of these will be communicating with the services layer which will handle system events, task management, automation invocation and automation results tracking. These services will also be required to communicate with the intelligent router, which will handle the prioritization based on built-in logic set by your organization. And finally, in this network we include the task and execution stores that hold the data being transacted upon throughout these events. The Manage Task microservice will need to log information into the ticketing system, which isn’t required to be on an isolated network, but is depicted as such to clarify it only needs to communicate with that service, and not the entire architecture. Similarly, the Automation Results service will communicate with both the orchestrator and the results listener, but it’s not required for an isolated network if you want to simplify things in your own implementation.



Quote for the day:

"Integrity is the soul of leadership! Trust is the engine of leadership!" -- Amine A. Ayad

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