Tag: strategy

Guides

What do you need to be Cyber Leader?

Introduction

What does it take to be a cyber leader? How do we address a broad challenge we have in today’s business world?

There are a huge number of organisations whereby the leadership do not have domain expertise in cyber and related disciplines. There are decision makers who are having to best guess. On the other end of the spectrum, we have thousands and thousands of people trying to “break into cyber” yet they face largely insane entry requirements with the forementioned adding things to junior and entry level role which include:

  • Must have a CISSP (CISSP requires 5 years’ experience and is an Information Security certificate that is very broad and not very deep, it also covers a range of areas that in my opinion aren’t even required for many cyber security capabilities inside organisations)
  • Must have a Certified Ethical Hacker (this exam includes remember historic malware dates, is that really what we need from our leaders?)
  • Must have a very large level of experience of be from an existing cyber role

Read more “What do you need to be Cyber Leader?” →

Defense

Why are ransomware attacks so devastating? – Part 1

Introduction

“Ransomware is a major issue!”

Hang on maybe we need to re-phrase that:

“Weak security postures are a major issue!”

or perhaps.. why not both!

I’ve been working with digital technology management for over 20 years, I started out when I was a kid (literally) fixing people’s PCs in their offices, removing malware, improving configurations, writing batch file menus, and playing games. As time has gone on technology has shrunk and continually become more and more of our everyday lives.

Back in 2003 I responded internally to MSBlaster, an SMB worm that had a devastating effect for the time, by today’s standards it was child play, however I remember saying “it’s a good job it didn’t delete everything whilst it was here.” (Or something very similar. Post NACHI/Blaster my friends and I were talking about how worse it could get. Fast forward in time and it’s much worse. Yet when I look at networks, they don’t look very different to how they did back in the 2000s.

Despite a multi-billion-dollar cyber security industry, it seems daily that organisations are succumbing to “cyber-attacks” which commonly include ransomware. Why are they successful and why are they so impactful? Well, let’s take a look! Read more “Why are ransomware attacks so devastating? – Part 1” →

Hand pointing towards cybery things Defense

Routine Security Governance and Management Activities you should plan…

Security Planning 101

I have been thinking about how organisations manage (or do not manage) their security postures from both a governance and management point of view. To help organisations that are just starting on their security improvement journey I thought I have put together a list of activities they may want to have in a forward schedule document (you could even call it a roadmap). It is not going to be all things to all people and different organisations and markets will have different requirements.

Read more “Routine Security Governance and Management Activities you should plan for” →