The popularity of cloud services has increased exponentially in recent years. The prospects of saving on capital and operational expenditures have been significant driving forces in influencing companies to adopt cloud services. Scalability and elasticity are also key drivers that encourage companies to move to the cloud. However, moving to the cloud comes with a lot of challenges. Security is a big concern for organizations that want to migrate to the cloud.

The most relevant cybersecurity threat to most businesses may be human, not technical. A sudden wave of cybercrime paired with longstanding tech labor challenges has created a cybersecurity skills gap, leaving companies without the expertise they need. Some companies lack dedicated security staff entirely, while others have a small, overworked department trying to manage massive workloads. Companies that hope to stay safe need to address this talent shortage.

Over US $43 billion has been lost through Business Email Compromise attacks since 2016, according to data released this week by the FBI. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) issued a public service announcement on May 4 2022, sharing updated statistics on Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks which use a variety of social engineering and phishing techniques to break into accounts and trick companies into transferring large amounts of money into the hands of criminals.

When I joined nCircle as a security researcher in 2006, ASPL 117 had just been released. I missed the ASPL-100 release celebration, which included custom sweatshirts, but there was still one unclaimed shirt in the office and I brought it home, my first piece of company swag. That shirt still hangs in my closet all these years later.

In 2002 I sat in a local bookstore in Jackson Hole, WY that offered a few Internet-connected computers for hourly use. After chatting with the owner and petting the resident store dog, I took a few guesses at the password protecting these computers. It took me maybe 10 attempts. It was, of course, some variation of the dog’s name. While this is a very dated story, it’s this kind of story that still drives many people’s perception of why a strong password is necessary.

It is often stated that security is hard. Whether it is the people, processes, and technology, or any combination of the three, security is a never ending challenge. Conversely, compliance is the opposite. Compliance is relatively straightforward. For too long, and for too many organisations, meeting a compliance standard was seen as a satisfactory way to boast of security. The competing ideologies of security versus compliance have long vexed even the most optimistic cybersecurity professional.

In the past, I’ve written about digital privacy and how much data we leak through our day to day interactions. I think this is an important topic to consider and really focus on and it is an element of cybersecurity at both the enterprise and personal level that isn’t discussed enough.

If your company is worried about the financial hit of paying a ransom to cybercriminals after a ransomware attack, wait until they find out the true cost of a ransomware attack. Because the total costs of recovering from the ransomware attack are likely to be much, much higher. That’s the finding of a new study by researchers at Check Point, who discovered that the average total cost of a ransomware attack is more than seven times higher than the average ransom paid.

We all know that it is a question of when you will be compromised and not if you will be compromised. It is unavoidable. The goal of CIS Control 17 is to ensure that you are set up for success when that inevitable breach occurs. If an organization is neither equipped nor prepared for that potential data breach, they are not likely to succeeded in responding to the threat.

It’s not often we can say this, but 2022 is shaping up to be an exciting time in information governance, especially for those interested in compliance and compliance frameworks. We started the year in eager anticipation of the new version of the international standard for information security management systems, ISO 27001:2022, soon to be followed by version 4.0 of the PCI DSS standard.