Cyber-attacks against maritime and shipping organizations are only increasing. Notwithstanding the IMO’s requirement for organizations in this sector to achieve cyber resilience by 2021, more and more entities are being crippled by malicious attacks.

For many organizations, security flows from the top down. That’s a problem when executives don’t emphasize security as much as they should. Cisco learned as much in its CISO Benchmark Study “Securing What’s Now and What’s Next20 Cybersecurity Considerations for 2020.” Here are just some of the findings from Cisco’s study: The reason for these findings wasn’t immediately apparent from Cisco’s study.

By now, we know a lot about secure configuration management (SCM). We know the way it works, the integral processes of which it consists, the areas of your IT infrastructure that it can help secure as well as the different types of best practice frameworks and regulatory compliance standards with which it can help you to maintain compliance. All we’re missing is how to procure and deploy an effective SCM solution.

During the late 1990s, security professionals were using information assurance tools in concert with vulnerability scanners to detect and remove vulnerabilities from the systems for which they are responsible. There’s just one problem – each security vendor has its own database with little to no crossover.

In a fast-changing world, stopping to assess your success isn’t really an option anymore. It is increasingly important that security teams are constantly proving their worth and tracking their successes with a view to constantly improving so as to not to get caught behind the times and therefore exposed.

Security culture matters to executives, but these individuals are struggling to implement it. In a November 2019 study commissioned by KnowBe4, 94% of individuals with managerial duties or higher in security or risk management said that security culture was important for their organization’s success.

The 2020 Cost of Data Breach report from IBM and the Ponemon is out. It provides a detailed analysis of causes, costs and controls that appeared in their sampling of data breaches. The report is full of data, and the website allows you to interact with its information so that you can do your own analysis and/or dig into aspects relevant to you and your industry.

A joint cybersecurity advisory released on September 1st detailed technical methods for uncovering and responding to malicious activity including best practice mitigations and common missteps. A collaborative effort, this advisory (coded AA20-245A) is the product of research from the cybersecurity organizations of five nations.

Security configuration management (SCM) can help organizations do much more than just harden their attack surfaces against intrusions. This fundamental control also has the ability to make your audits flow more smoothly. Indeed, it allows organizations to pull reports from any point in time and demonstrate how their configuration changes and alignments help to support their compliance efforts.