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Even organizations with solid cybersecurity programs will have findings from a security assessment. After all, cyber attacks and attackers continue to learn and evolve, always trying to be one step ahead of their prospects. Through our years of performing security assessments, here are the Top 5 areas that we have found to need remediation work post-assessment.
Appalachia is proud to be a member of The ASCII Group, a community for managed services providers, IT service providers, and managed security service providers. Recently Jason McNew, Senior Engineer, Cybersecurity Risk & Compliance, was invited to contribute his experience and knowledge of ransomware, along with a few select members to help the ASCII community.
Adapting...with a smile!
In a previous blog post, we discussed how to calculate your SPRS (Supplier Performance Risk System) score in support of your CMMC (Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification) efforts. In that same blog, we also provided a free tool to help you calculate your SPRS score automatically.
The day after Thanksgiving, widely referred to as Black Friday, has marked the start of the Christmas shopping season since 1952. Surprisingly, it wasn’t until 2012 that the Black Friday buzz was adapted to further stoke the shopping fire by promoting Cyber Monday. Whether shoppers choose to chase the deals in person or from the privacy of their own homes, personal information is being shared in the form of email addresses, home addresses, and credit card numbers. As the stores are preparing by stocking shelves and bulking up employee headcount, cyber criminals are also preparing to capitalize on the shopping frenzy, hoping to catch consumers with their guards down.
One of the great “must reads” for us cybersecurity wonks is the annual DBIR (Data Breach and Incident Response), issued by Verizon every year since 2008. While never dull, the DBIR is not a light read and comes in at a meaty 115 pages this year. While we at Appalachia are delighted to stuff our horns with popcorn and study every last page, we realize that not everyone can make the time to fully digest this comprehensive treatise. To that end, we have taken the time to write an executive summary of the DBIR for readers of our blog – because we care, and we don’t want you missing reruns or tee time.
We are extremely proud of the men and women in our organization who have served our country. Coming from the Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Army, these members have taken their experiences in the military and applied it to their civilian careers. To honor the veterans on our staff, I asked them to share - what they learned, their greatest achievement, their greatest challenge, and how we can step up to support our veterans. Thank you, Mike, Nathalie, Jason, Derek, Joel, and Jason!
The Netflix docudrama film The Social Dilemma describes Facebook as “The problem beneath all other problems.” As this is a security/technical blog we are not in the business of bashing or praising social media, but it goes without saying that Facebook has become omnipresent in the daily lives of literally billions of people. The same is also true of Instagram and WhatsApp, two other massive social media properties which were also unavailable for about six hours on October 4th. When something that big falls that hard, there are always unforeseen and unintended consequences.