Our Blogs – For CIOs by CIOs

By Christopher Barron
Associate

As the CIO you’ve been tasked with ensuring that your organization’s IT systems are more secure. You’ve got a budget (although it’s tight). You’ve got mandates (“Don’t let us get hacked!” “Increase our perimeter strength!” “Make it a ‘Top 3’ initiative for the year!”). But if you’re like many CIOs, what you don’t have is an understanding of the basic premises and precepts of cybersecurity.

To get appropriate cybersecurity controls in place, where in the world should you start?

By Scott S. Smith
Security Practice Lead

Given the fact that many organizations experience near-continuous cyberattack attempts, if you have not already done so, getting a robust cybersecurity plan in place is a must. This plan needs to be tailored to address your organization’s business requirements, culture and risk tolerance around cybersecurity. It also will need to ensure compliance with applicable regulations and laws, and include plans for how to respond if, in spite of your best efforts, a security breach takes place. You don’t want to be in Equifax’s situation, where a hacker’s ability to exploit what was most likely a known weakness has now put millions of consumers’ identity and financial security at risk. The government, your customers and the general public are all losing their tolerance for disasters that happen when known problems are ignored.

By Scott S. Smith
Security Practice Lead

Given the dramatically negative impact that a cybersecurity failure can have on your business, implementing a cybersecurity plan is mission critical. In my last article I talked about some of the business-driven needs that might drive your cybersecurity plan. Today I will address some of the steps you need to take to get a cybersecurity plan in place.

By Scott S. Smith
Security Practice Lead

The recent data breach at Equifax is just one of the latest in a long string of high-profile cybersecurity failures. In this particular case, the Social Security numbers and other sensitive information of up to 143 million Americans were exposed. In another case, the NotPetya attack very quickly spread to, then severely hobbled operations in, corporations around the world, including the giant shipping company Maersk.

These and other recent cybersecurity failures in the news have resulted in intellectual property loss, disclosure of embarrassing communications, loss of business, massive public relations nightmares, and more. And that’s just for the high-profile cases!

By Stephen McGrady
Principal

If Hurricane Harvey and the magnitude 8.1 earthquake off the coast of Mexico didn’t get you thinking about whether your business is prepared to withstand a major disaster, chances are Hurricane Irma or Maria did.

Like most professionals who work in the Business Continuity Planning (BCP) field, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the implications of having three major natural disasters strike in North America within a 1-1/2 week span. It’s become clear to me that even if you have what you thought was a solid plan in place to keep your business operating after a disaster, your plan might not be good enough. After all, most organizations put plans in place that address how they’ll recover from one disaster. Very few ever consider the possibility that the situation may be even worse than that.

By Stephen McGrady
Principal

Those responsible for Business Continuity Planning (BCP)—i.e. having plans in place to keep a business running after disaster strikes—understand that the world really can be a dangerous place. Although hacking, malware and ransomware aren’t really “new” threats per se, they have certainly grown in frequency and impact.

As some recent high-profile situations have shown, terrible things can and do happen to organizations everywhere. Case in point: Disney was recently hit with a ransom demand by hackers who claimed to have stolen the latest “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie. A few weeks before that, hackers stole the latest season of “Orange is the New Black” from Netflix, and leaked episodes when the firm refused to meet their ransom demands. And then there’s the widely-publicized “WannaCry” ransomware attack, which affected over 200,000 computers in 150 countries in May.

By Stephen McGrady
Principal

As I discussed in my article on the difference between Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) planning, Business Continuity Planning is about the operations side of disaster preparedness. How will you keep the business running after disaster strikes?

When helping organizations address their Business Continuity Planning needs, CIO Professional Services uses a four-step approach: conduct a Business Impact Assessment, get Governance mechanisms defined and approved, prepare the team to handle Crisis Management, and create the Emergency Operating Plans (EOPs) for highly-impacted departments. Here’s an overview of how this works…

By Stephen McGrady
Principal

There’s nothing like the unthinkable happening to make businesses realize that the unthinkable really can and does happen. This was the case with the 9/11 attacks, which not only collapsed two towers, but also left a significant part of lower Manhattan closed for business for quite some time. By 9/12 the necessity of preparing for disasters was at the forefront of every executive’s mind.

That said, disaster preparation is a multi-faceted endeavor. The two biggest aspects are known as Disaster Recovery (DR) planning and Business Continuity Planning (BCP). The following is a high-level introduction to both…

By Scott Smith
Security Practice Lead

Whether talking to people at large companies or small companies, when we bring up the topic of Identity and Access Management (IAM) we often hear a lot of the same comments…

• “I am concerned that we have employees who have been here 10 years, and have access to everything, but I don’t know how to control that risk.”

• “Of course we have password policies…but I’m not sure they’re being enforced.”

• “I recently discovered an account for someone who left the company 14 months ago.”

• “Half the people in our IT department have global permissions—they can access anything.”

By Scott Smith
Security Practice Lead

Four years ago Target suffered a data breach that caught the attention of consumers and executives everywhere. By starting with a stolen dormant login from an HVAC contractor who was no longer working with Target, attackers were able to gain root access directly into Target’s data center. Once in, they found a web application vulnerability and managed to use this to steal the PII (personally identifiable information) for over 70,000 people, and seize the data for over 40 million credit and debit cards from a Point of Sale system that was not directly connected to the internet.