In the ongoing battle to protect corporate data, you can’t afford to miss a step. I’ve seen, first-hand, what can happen when organizations do miss steps. We are always happy to help them remediate going forward, but there’s a lingering wish that we’d met them sooner.

Over the last two years, digital transformation has accelerated at breakneck speed, opening new lines of business that meet user demand. Reality is, online banking, order-ahead meals, telehealth appointments, and online grocery shopping are no longer optional. Users expect these to be available 24/7, so any business that wants to compete and values customer loyalty needs to digitize its services as much as possible.

Being a cybersecurity practitioner 15-20 years ago sometimes made me the unpopular guy in the room. People are always excited about financial gain – opening new lines of business, developing creative and sustainable revenue streams – you know, the fun stuff. But nobody wanted to talk about cybersecurity-related financial losses at that time – especially not potential losses due to risks that very few people understood yet.

The terms “readiness” and “resiliency” complement each other, but they’re different.

In last week’s discussion around readiness and resilience, I introduced the concept of what it means to have “threat-informed” cybersecurity. This week, I want to show you what that looks like in the real world – how it should drive you to challenge more assumptions, reduce your attack surface, and game out real-world scenarios.

Long popular in the military, “readiness and resiliency” is a staple of cybersecurity, too. It makes sense. Both institutions value (1) being alert to threats and risks while (2) recognizing that the types of threats and risks themselves are less important than the reaction to them. But how companies PERCEIVE risk is often very different from how they TAKE ON risks. Over 90% of my penetration tests have concluded with successful entry into “secure” environments.

So, you (or your friendly neighborhood MSP) have just finished a vulnerability scan as part of a vulnerability management program and/or in preparation for penetration testing. But one ominous question looms: What next? Sorting through hundreds of thousands of vulnerability logs can be daunting, and determining which ones are worth investigating further is even less of a trivial task.

A Domain Name System (DNS) is a protocol that translates human-readable domain names/URLs—like favoritewebsite.com—into IP addresses that computers can read—like 135.24.56.98. DNS servers handle tens of thousands of queries that transfer minute bits of data between devices, systems, and servers—which makes DNS an attractive and easily exploitable vector for hackers (Cloudns.net).

2023 finds us in a sustained cybersecurity hiring crisis. With 3.4 million too few experts to meet global demand, it seems the widespread investments in university programs, increased certification access, and upskilling for existing IT professionals isn’t enough to bridge the gap.