Cyber Defense eMagazine August 2020 Edition

Security by Design: How to Protect the 

Future of Business 

How To Grow Your Cyber Expertise During 

A Pandemic 

Is What’s Lurking in Your Network About 

to Come Out? 

Cyber Security Market to Reach USD 400 

Billion by 2026 

…and much more… 

Cyber Defense eMagazine – August 2020 Edition 1 

Copyright © 2020, Cyber Defense Magazine. All rights reserved worldwide.

CONTENTS 

Welcome to CDM’s August 2020 Issue --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6 

Security by Design: How to Protect the Future of Business --------------------------------------------------------- 23 

By Jim Zuffoletti, CEO & co-founder of SafeGuard Cyber 

How To Grow Your Cyber Expertise During A Pandemic ------------------------------------------------------------ 27 

By Bradley Hayes, Chief Technology Officer at Circadence 

Is What’s Lurking in Your Network About to Come Out? ------------------------------------------------------------ 30 

By Carolyn Crandall, Chief Deception Officer, Attivo Networks 

Cyber Security Market to Reach USD 400 Billion by 2026 ----------------------------------------------------------- 34 

By Saloni Walimbe, Content Writer at Global Market Insights, Inc. 

COVID-19 And Security Team Cuts Are Costing Businesses in Cyber and Financial Risks ------------------ 37 

By Samantha Humphries, security strategist, Exabeam 

Cybersecurity Challenges When Working from Home --------------------------------------------------------------- 50 

By Renuka Sahane, Sr. Content Writer, Scalefusion 

Network Security Is Not Data Security ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 54 

By Matt Cable, VP Solutions Architects & MD Europe, Certes Networks 

WireGuard - Separating Fact from Fiction ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 57 

By Tomislav Čohar, co-founder, hide.me VPN 

Conducting Risk Prioritization and Remediation to Combat Challenges in The Distributed Workforce 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 60 

By Egon Rinderer, Global Vice President of Technology and Federal CTO, Tanium 

Can We Better Leverage Our – Already Scarce – Cyber Security Human Resources? ----------------------- 64 

By Douglas Ferguson, Founder & CTO, Pharos Security 

CERT Warns Bad Actors Are Targeting Remote Access – How Security Operations Find and Route 

These “Below the Radar” Attacks ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 67 

By Saryu Nayyar, CEO, Gurucul 



4 Simple Ways to Repel Ransomware as The Rise in Remote Work Continues ------------------------------- 70 

By Kris Lahiri, Co-founder and Chief Security Officer of Egnyte 

Ransomware, Risk, And Recovery ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 73 

By Mickey Bresman, CEO, Semperis 

Getting Employees Back to the New Normal --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 77 

By Brendan O’Connor, CEO and Co-founder, AppOmni 

Security in The New Normal Requires an Agile Approach ---------------------------------------------------------- 80 

By Danny Presten, Chief Methodologist at Digital.ai 

Why Are Fully Staffed Cybersecurity Teams Unable to Keep Up with Hacks? -------------------------------- 84 

By Steve Salinas, Head of Product Marketing, Deep Instinct 

Looks Like Russian Hackers Are on An Email Scam Spree ----------------------------------------------------------- 88 

By Tim Sadler, CEO, Tessian 

TLS/ SSL Decryption – One of the Main Pillars of Zero Trust Model---------------------------------------------- 91 

By Adil Baghir, Technology Consultant Lead, Middle East & Africa at A10 Networks 

Build Your AI Incident Response Plan… Before It’s Too Late ------------------------------------------------------- 94 

By Patrick Hall* and Andrew Burt** 

Why Academic Openness and A Rise in Online Classes Should Invoke A Renewed Focus on Security - 99 

By Anthony Bettini, CTO, WhiteHat Security 

Is API Usage Putting Your Organization Out of Compliance? ---------------------------------------------------- 102 

By Matt Keil, Director of Product Marketing, Cequence Security 

HIPAA Compliance and The Protection of Cyber Security --------------------------------------------------------- 105 

By Andrew Mikhailov, CTO at Zfort Group 

Smart Gadgets in Proving Workplace Violence ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 109 

By Milica D. Djekic 

Cyber Against Granny ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 116 

By Yotam Gutman, SentinelOne 

Are the Worst Cryptocurrency Security Breaches Behind Us? --------------------------------------------------- 119 

By Tim Fries, Co-Founder, The Tokenist 



@MILIEFSKY 

From the 

Publisher… 

New CyberDefenseMagazine.com website, plus updates at CyberDefenseTV.com & CyberDefenseRadio.com 

Dear Friends, 

In the August issue of Cyber Defense Magazine, you will find both relevant and actionable 

intelligence from a broad spectrum of cyber experts. We at Cyber Defense Media Group are 

pleased to provide our readers and clients with up-to-date and cogent articles on which you 

can rely in fulfilling your own duties. 

In my role as Publisher, I make it my daily responsibility to observe, digest, and select 

those topics of greatest value and interest to practitioners in the world of cybersecurity. 

Today, we face a continuation and deepening of the effects of COVID-19 on nearly all enterprises which depend 

on cyberspace for their operations. The challenges of maintaining security continue to grow with our dependence 

on cyber-related systems of all kinds. 

In the midst of increasing attacks on cyber systems across the board, we must keep an eye on the effects of “social 

distancing” and the prospect of re-opening in-person activities. Since these restrictions do not appear to be going 

away in the near future, it’s imperative to concentrate on strengthening protections against cyber exploits. 

Sharing actionable intelligence is the first and best means of doing so. 

In this spirit, we are pleased to continue providing the powerful combination of monthly eMagazines, daily 

updates and features on the Cyber Defense Magazine home page, and webinars featuring national and 

international experts on topics of immediate interest. 

We've also launched our Black Unicorn Report for 2020 which you can download by visiting 

www.cyberdefenseawards.com. Please share in our enthusiasm and congratulations for all of the winners, as they 

help us get one step ahead of the next breach. 

Warmest regards, 

Gary S. Miliefsky 

Gary S.Miliefsky, CISSP®, fmDHS 

CEO, Cyber Defense Media Group 

Publisher, Cyber Defense Magazine 

P.S. When you share a story or an article or information about 

CDM, please use #CDM and @CyberDefenseMag and 

@Miliefsky – it helps spread the word about our free resources 

even more quickly 



@CYBERDEFENSEMAG 

CYBER DEFENSE eMAGAZINE 

Published monthly by the team at Cyber Defense Media Group and 

distributed electronically via opt-in Email, HTML, PDF and Online 

Flipbook formats. 

InfoSec Knowledge is Power. We will 

always strive to provide the latest, most 

up to date FREE InfoSec information. 

From the International 

Editor-in-Chief… 

The word “quarantine” has been in use in one form or another for 

many centuries. In any search for its root, the Italian term 

quarantena, meaning "forty days" will appear. In its original 

concept, the period of 40 days was considered to be an adequate 

period for a disease to run its course and general health to return. 

Today, we are experiencing physical quarantine requirements for 

both national and other jurisdictional borders. 

In contrast, there is no assurance that any such set period can 

provide a way to avoid cyber disruptions brought about by “viruses” 

or other criminal exploits. Both the private and government sectors 

must undertake immediate and ongoing actions to overcome these 

incursions. 

As we observed last month, the international effects of COVID-19 

include restrictions on physical travel, resulting in greater 

dependence on cyber “travel” to accomplish necessary business 

and government functions. As might be expected, this expanded 

reliance on cyber resources also provides greater opportunities for 

criminal activity. Only by concerted and cooperative efforts can we 

succeed in implementing an effective defense. 

Accordingly, let me take this occasion to renew my suggestion that 

in the days ahead we agree to put our differences aside in favor of 

responding to our common enemies: the COVID-19 virus itself and 

those who would take advantage of this crisis to perpetrate 

criminal schemes. 

To our faithful readers, we thank you, 

Pierluigi Paganini 

International Editor-in-Chief 

PRESIDENT & CO-FOUNDER 

Stevin Miliefsky 

stevinv@cyberdefensemagazine.com 

INTERNATIONAL EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & CO-FOUNDER 

Pierluigi Paganini, CEH 

Pierluigi.paganini@cyberdefensemagazine.com 

US EDITOR-IN-CHIEF 

Yan Ross, JD 

Yan.Ross@cyberdefensemediagroup.com 

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Marketing Team 

marketing@cyberdefensemagazine.com 

CONTACT US: 

Cyber Defense Magazine 

Toll Free: 1-833-844-9468 

International: +1-603-280-4451 

SKYPE: cyber.defense 

http://www.cyberdefensemagazine.com 

Copyright © 2020, Cyber Defense Magazine, a division of 

CYBER DEFENSE MEDIA GROUP (a Steven G. Samuels LLC d/b/a) 

276 Fifth Avenue, Suite 704, New York, NY 10001 

EIN: 454-18-8465, DUNS# 078358935. 

All rights reserved worldwide. 

PUBLISHER 

Gary S. Miliefsky, CISSP® 

Learn more about our founder & publisher at: 

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8 YEARS OF EXCELLENCE! 

Providing free information, best practices, tips and 

techniques on cybersecurity since 2012, Cyber Defense 

magazine is your go-to-source for Information Security. 

We’re a proud division of Cyber Defense Media Group: 

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Welcome to CDM’s August 2020 Issue 

From the U.S. Editor-in-Chief 

There is no “new normal” – and there isn’t going to be. 

Regardless of what you may read elsewhere about the “new normal,” it’s no more than wishful thinking 

or sales puffery. The very term “normal” implies stability, but the entire cyber system is in flux. As a 

dynamic rather than static phenomenon, the concept of “normal” is no longer appropriate in our world, 

and the sooner we all prepare to live with that fact, the better prepared we will all be to exercise effective 

cyber defenses. 

The closest battle analogy to what we now face is “asymmetrical warfare.” In short, that refers to the 

situation where the attackers and defenders play by two different sets of rules. In the cyber world, the 

attackers honor no rules at all. Moreover, the defenders have to repel 100% of the attacks to prevail, but 

the attackers only have to score occasionally. 

In the case of malware and ransomware, the target organizations are proscribed from engaging in 

criminal activity, such as hunting down and destroying the criminals. We must rely on government action 

to find and punish them. But that doesn’t mean we can’t provide helpful information to law enforcement. 

At least they have remedies like seizing assets, confiscating accounts, and imprisonment. 

In that perspective, we are pleased to present the August 2020 issue of Cyber Defense Magazine, with 

over two dozen articles on cyber and security topics of immediate interest. We continue to provide 

thoughtful articles from a broad spectrum of contributors who share their expertise and insights with our 

community. 

Wishing you all success in your cyber security endeavors, 

Yan Ross 

US Editor-in-Chief 


About the US Editor-in-Chief 

Yan Ross, J.D., is a Cybersecurity Journalist & US Editor-in-Chief for 

Cyber Defense Magazine. He is an accredited author and educator and 

has provided editorial services for award-winning best-selling books on 

a variety of topics. He also serves as ICFE's Director of Special Projects, 

and the author of the Certified Identity Theft Risk Management Specialist 

® XV CITRMS® course. As an accredited educator for over 20 years, Yan addresses risk management 

in the areas of identity theft, privacy, and cyber security for consumers and organizations holding sensitive 

personal information. You can reach him via his e-mail address at 

yan.ross@cyberdefensemediagroup.com 



















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Security by Design: How to Protect the Future of 

Business 

By Jim Zuffoletti, CEO & co-founder of SafeGuard Cyber 

Estimates suggest that by 2021, cybercrime will cost the world $6 trillion every year. This will constitute 

“the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history,” making cybercrime “more profitable than the global 

trade of all major illegal drugs combined.” 

Too many enterprises fail to protect themselves adequately because most of them are approaching 

cybersecurity in the wrong way. They are recapitulating Web 1.0 models of information security, in which 

security is applied as an afterthought, bolted on to a process or technology solution. 

This approach is inadequate. Modern forms of digital risk are too sophisticated and too dangerous. 

Instead, to simultaneously drive business growth and properly protect themselves, forward-looking 

enterprises need to implement a Security by Design approach. This approach enables companies to build 

comprehensive security into the foundations of all enterprise teams, processes, and behavior – 

empowering organizations to embrace new digital tools with peace of mind. 



Security by Design: Trading the Reactive for the Proactive 

The security perimeter is gone. Today, every aspect of the business is tied to cloud SaaS applications 

and mobile chat apps that live outside the traditional perimeter. Marketing makes constant use of social 

media apps; customer data is stored in a cloud-based CRM; internal communications are conducted over 

collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams; sales teams might even leverage WhatsApp and WeChat 

to talk to prospects. An enterprise’s daily operations are conducted in the cloud, and more importantly, 

that’s where data resides, too. Business communications contain customer data, IP, and more. 

With a Security by Design approach, you react to this reality by constructing a flexible network perimeter 

around every end user. You depart from the 64% of businesses who don’t include the security team in 

discussions of technology-enabled business initiatives. Instead, you start with understanding what tools 

are needed by all the people within the enterprise, and then you apply security to all of those tools – at 

the end user level. You create a tech stack and a set of practices that mean security is woven through 

every part of the business. 

Traditional security tools are not built to deal with a post-perimeter, multi-channel security landscape. 

Because of this, they can only offer a reactive security stance. Events like these become commonplace: 

● Information security finds out that an employee opened a malicious link sent over LinkedIn, and 

malware has transited from their home computer over the VPN. They rush to try and repair the 

damage. 

● HR finds out that a group of employees is bullying another employee over Slack, and has to go 

and investigate – weeks after the issue started. 

● Marketing suddenly finds themselves locked out of the company Instagram, and only then do 

they try to roll out an account takeover response plan. 

● A sales rep discovers a fake website that has been up and running for months, and belatedly 

begins the long process of trying to get the website taken down. 

● A compliance office discovers that a rep has been having a noncompliant conversation with a 

prospect, and can only try and correct the behavior after the fact. 

Everything is reactivity. However, if you are only trying to deal with incidents once they have already 

occurred, you are setting yourself up for controlled failure. Eventually, one of these incidents will be 

serious: a ransomware attack, IP theft, or something else that can seriously hamper growth. 

By contrast, a Security by Design framework establishes protection from digital risks prior to their 

emergence as a threat. 



Security by Design = Growth by Design 

The real beauty of Security by Design is that the approach can have a material business impact. A bad 

ransomware attack, or IP theft, can be devastating, and seriously hamper ambitions of growth. To be 

productive, reach customers, and stay competitive, businesses need to embrace social media, 

collaboration apps, and messaging apps. But without the right protections, in embracing these cloud 

channels, they are rolling the dice on the integrity of their enterprise. Their digital transformation is risky, 

and contains blind spots. 

However, once security is built into an enterprise’s approach, new tools and platforms are secure from 

the start. This immediately creates secondary business benefits. When you are proactively monitoring 

your cloud channels, entire new datasets are generated. These can then be piped via an API into a 

business insights engine. Compliance issues can be monitored in real time, at scale, across various 

languages. 

Security by Design is an approach that powers business goals. Security teams have become accustomed 

to being seen as the department that wants to put the brakes on sales and marketing’s embrace of new 

tools – but with this approach, they can do the opposite. They can greenlight new tools, and work with 

growth teams to optimize the output of those tools so that they become a part of the revenue engine. 

One layer down, the business benefits of Security by Design compound again. Alongside staff members, 

consumers also value security. Individuals are tired of data breaches, and solemn promises by 

enterprises to do better next time. As Ernst & Young put it, “when data confidentiality, integrity or 

availability are compromised, or products and services cease to perform as expected, trust built over 

years can be lost in a day.” 

Being able to present yourself as a company that is prioritizing security in active and innovative ways is 

a major competitive advantage. By moving toward a proactive security model, you both better protect 

your company and your employees from attacks – and better satisfy customers. 

Let’s revisit how a Security by Design approach changes the business examples cited above. When you 

trade a security as bolt-on approach for a Security by Design approach, you move from a reactive stance 

to a proactive stance: 

● Information security procures technology to enable employees to use LinkedIn. The technology 

immediately detects any malicious links, flags the posts and intercepts the content – before 

anything malicious can be clicked on. 

● HR procures technology to protect the company’s expanded Slack environment. Inappropriate 

conduct is immediately flagged, and HR can intervene early and stop the problem from worsening. 



● Marketing and security defined the roles and responsibilities for social media and fake accounts. 

Using a cross-function approach, Marketing detects an account takeover, and immediately 

retakes control. They alert security to the incident. 

● Sales can work with marketing and security to initiate a takedown of any fake account. Such 

accounts are detected by technology that actively crawls the internet (both surface and dark) 

around the clock. 

● A compliance officer is notified that a message sent by a rep might contain an issue, because 

compliance and sales have agreed on what channels need monitoring. The message has been 

quarantined so it can be checked before it is allowed to be sent. 

The Future of Security is by Design 

A Security by Design framework enables enterprises to properly protect themselves, and move from a 

reactive stance, where a crisis is always around the corner, to a proactive stance. Security by Design is 

the only sensible approach in an era where so many business-critical tools live outside the traditional 

perimeter, and modern digital risks are so numerous, complex, and sophisticated. 

Security by Design is also the only sensible approach for enterprises that want to do everything they can 

do to drive growth. When a Security by Design framework is properly implemented, security becomes a 

driver of business success. Executives and board members can view digital security as achieving a 

positive goal that helps drive business growth. Security becomes synonymous with revenue. When 

properly safeguarding the organization is understood as simple financial prudence, including security at 

the inception of a product or service becomes an obvious best practice. This view of security is the future. 

About the Author 

Jim Zuffoletti has been a founder of start-up organizations as 

both an entrepreneur and an intrapreneur for the past twenty-five 

years. Jim is CEO and co-founder of SafeGuard Cyber, a digital 

risk protection company securing brands, VIPs, and team 

members in the new world of social media and digital 

communications. Jim was previously CEO and President of 

OpenQ which enabled pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical 

device companies to discover, regulate, and leverage the social 

networks forged with outside influencers and researchers. Jim 

Zuffoletti can be reached at our company website at 

www.safeguardcyber.com. 



How To Grow Your Cyber Expertise During A Pandemic 

By Bradley Hayes, Chief Technology Officer at Circadence 

IT pros can still learn new skills despite perceived barriers to progressing professionally during the 

pandemic. While work circumstances and environmental factors have changed in our world and most 

people are working and learning remote, a professional's ability to learn is the one thing we can be certain 

about right now. And, let’s face it, now it’s more important than ever for cyber pros to be up-to-date on 

cybersecurity skills since so many people are encountering increasing amounts of cyber risks while 

working remote. Even with the shift to remote work, IT pros can stay connected to the industry and 

continue advancing their skills with professional IT/cyber groups, online trainings, cyber games and more. 

Here are a few ways cyber professionals and cyber newcomers can continue to grow their career and 

expertise during this pandemic. 

Build cyber skills with hands-on, online training 

It’s more vital than ever for cyber professionals to get the training they need to learn about new threats 

and protect company assets. From safeguarding a remote workforce to protecting sensitive online data, 

cyber professionals have a lot to do, but need to be highly trained to know how to do it. Distance learning 



has been a massive shift for many students, and even for those who are ‘students of the business’ 

learning and training virtually certainly requires a different mindset. Luckily, new emerging training 

platforms are making it easy and fun for cyber professionals to learn new skills from anywhere at a pace 

that works for them. Circadence’s Project Ares gamified training platform allows learners to build skills 

via engaging and personalized hands-on methods. Using gamification and intelligent tutoring AI, learners 

participate in a realistic, interactive curriculum of foundational and specialized scenarios in the form of 

battle rooms and missions, addressing real, current cyber threats across multiple industries, providing a 

comprehensive level of knowledge and practical experience. In a gamified cyber learning environment, 

cyber professionals are: 

✓ rewarded for completing tasks and objectives 

✓ incentivized to learn new skills persistently 

✓ encouraged to dialogue and learn together with peers 

✓ reminded of what they don’t yet know and held accountable 

✓ engaged in their progress through scores and leaderboards 

Gamified training is not only a viable solution that will impact today’s defenders, but it will truly change 

how cyber professionals learn and intellectualize a new skill. 

Network with cyber experts online 

Cyber professionals are in high demand right now. According to a report from cybersecurity nonprofit 

(ISC) 2 there are currently about 2.8 million cybersecurity professionals around the world, but that 

workforce would need to grow by roughly 145% to meet the global demand for digital security expertise. 

Since cyber careers are in high demand, it’s important for cyber professionals to network and put 

themselves out there…online. A few ways professionals can use digital connection to learn are: 

✓ Follow and engage with cyber companies on social media (i.e.; Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook) 

✓ Track topical hashtags like #cybertraining #cybersecurity #blackhat 

✓ Join cyber professional groups on LinkedIn 

✓ Participate in virtual conferences or online meet-ups such as the DC Cybersecurity Professionals 

or Bay Area Cybersecurity Meet-up 

Another way to show off skills and knowledge is with a platform like Project Ares, which maintains 

leaderboards and badges of accomplishments. This is a great way to attract a potential employer by 

demonstrating skills and expertise. 

Connect with formal cyber organizations 

There are also organizations that offer online networking events and educational webinars. For example, 

NICE/NIST and ISSA are highly reputable outlets to get connected on additional resources and cyber 

education. Many companies also offer live and on-demand webinars on current trending cyber topics. 

Here are a few as an example: Kickstarting a Cyber Career and Learning Happens Better with Games. 



Cyber competitions and hackathons are also great ways to connect. Cyber competitions expose 

contestants to a real-life cyber-attack or threat, making them think quick under tight deadlines to defend 

against it and protect their team’s assets. This is a great way for a cyber professional or newcomer to 

practice one’s skillset, engage with others in the community, and engage in some friendly competition! 

Cyber competitions positively impact a cyber professional or cyber newcomer’s experience to the industry 

by supporting new emerging technologies, engaging in environments for learners to demonstrate their 

abilities, and providing an opportunity for recruitment. 

Gain real-world experience during the pandemic 

Since there is such a strong need for cyber professionals right now, another way to advance your career 

or get noticed would be to offer up your expertise via a service to inspect a company’s remote workforce 

to ensure they are taking basic safety precautions during the pandemic. Since many companies do not 

have adequate cybersecurity support, your cyber intelligence and service might be simultaneously 

beneficial to a company in need and lead to a potential job or continued contract work with that company. 

More than likely, if you have a skill set in cyber, there is someone out there that needs your help. 

In times like these it can be easy to forget the importance of growing and advancing a career. Dramatic 

changes to how we work make it even more important to continue to train and learn to be that much more 

prepared for potential cyber threats. It’s important for all of us to continue to take part in being cyber-safe 

personally and professionally, but also to do our part in keeping the companies we work for and the 

broader economy safe from the increasing prevalence of costly cyber-attacks. 


Bradley Hayes, Chief Technology Officer at 

Circadence 

With decades of professional experience, Dr. 

Hayes’ expertise in Artificial Intelligence and 

Machine Learning supports continual innovation 

for Circadence’s cyber readiness solutions 

Hayes teachers as a professor at the University 

of Colorado’s Department of Computer Science and serves as the Director of the Collaborative AI and 

Robotics (CAIRO) Lab. He has in-depth experience developing techniques to build autonomous AI that 

can learn from and collaborate with humans, making people more efficient and capable during task 

execution. 



Is What’s Lurking in Your Network About to Come Out? 

The COVID-19 crisis was an unprecedented opportunity for attackers. Now, many may be ready to 

strike. 

By Carolyn Crandall, Chief Deception Officer, Attivo Networks 

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced countless millions of people to work remotely, and the rush to enable 

that remote work created opportunities for attackers to infiltrate corporate networks due to new devices, 

unmanaged endpoints, security gaps, and other issues. Now that the initial adjustment period is over, 

some businesses believe that the imminent danger has passed because they have yet to experience an 

attack. Unfortunately, this may not be the case. There is reason to believe that attackers may be hiding 

under the surface, lurking in corporate networks, and preparing to emerge and do damage. We will likely 

soon see new attacks as attackers begin to make their demands known. 

Why Now? 

Recent studies show that dwell time—the period that attackers spend inside the network before 

detection—is now just under 60 days for incidents discovered externally, though this can expand into 

months or even years for more advanced attacks. As the COVID-19 lockdown pushes past its third month, 



that 60-day threshold has begun to pass. Attackers who have been biding their time may soon be ready 

to strike. 

Today’s ransomware attackers don’t operate like they used to. While older ransomware attacks tended 

to be “smash and grab” operations stealing and encrypting any data they could, human-operated 

Ransomware 2.0 involves attackers spreading throughout the network to identify and target the most 

valuable information for the highest financial gain. For the largest possible payout, attackers want to take 

down a whole organization, not just one machine. Quickly spreading throughout the network to establish 

a stronger foothold is the smartest move, and given that the average ransomware payout was over 

$111,000 in Q1 2020 (up 33% from the previous quarter), the strategy appears to be working. 

The COVID-19 Lockdown Has Created New Opportunities 

The extensive remote work necessitated by COVID-19 has, unfortunately, exacerbated the issue. Most 

businesses simply were not prepared for this volume of employees working from home, and the sudden 

onset of the crisis meant that they had to make security compromises in the spirit of achieving service 

availability. Naturally, both technology-based and human-based security issues have arisen as a result. 

Network endpoints are more exposed, as employees access the network from the outside rather than 

from within. Employees are pulling data out of the company that may never have been off-premises 

before, creating opportunities for attackers to target less secure machines. Similarly, attackers are 

entering the network via split-tunneling VPNs, which separates personal employee traffic from company 

networks but doesn’t have all the traditional security controls needed to protect the remote systems from 

attacks. Multi-factor authentication can help verify identity as employees work remotely, but some 

organizations still do not mandate its use, and it is not always effective against targeted attacks. 

Phishing and other scams have also noticeably increased during the lockdown, preying on employees 

that are distracted or flustered by the sudden shift in routine, underscoring the fact that organizations 

have less control over employees working remotely. The number of BYOD devices (laptops, routers, 

access points, etc.) on the network has increased, and it is harder to verify that employees are doing 

things like installing security updates promptly, creating potential vulnerabilities. Even employee turnover 

can create openings for attackers, as it can be harder to verify the full removal of stored credentials and 

other attack paths from all applications and systems. Given that misused or stolen credentials continue 

to be at the center of countless breaches, this poses a significant threat. 

There are tools designed to help protect against these new threats, but they require effective security 

controls at multiple levels of the network. Traditional Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPPs) and Endpoint 

Detection and Response (EDR) tools try to stop attacks at the initial compromise of the system. Still, 

given the potential new vulnerabilities created by extensive remote work, attackers may have an easier 

time bypassing those tools during the current crisis, highlighting the importance of overlapping security 

controls and building in a safety net to boost detection capabilities. 



Assessing and Addressing These New Risks 

A balance of security controls is necessary for initial compromise, lateral movement, privilege escalation, 

and data loss prevention. If the attackers have already evaded EPP and EDR tools and compromised an 

internal system, technology like cyber deception plays a valuable role in detecting lateral movement and 

protecting applications from unauthorized access. Additionally, data loss prevention capabilities can stop 

employees (or attackers) from saving sensitive information to personal devices. 

Improving lateral movement detection is vital. After the initial compromise of a network, there is a dark 

period of lateral movement and privilege escalation before the data protection tools detect anything. This 

lack of visibility means that there is no detection mechanism present until the tail end of the attack, which 

may be too late. Most security controls will also have challenges pinpointing attack path vulnerabilities, 

and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). Unless the organization has a mechanism to record an 

attacker’s activity during a live attack (like a decoy or engagement environment), it can be difficult for 

security teams to understand the attack methods, their objectives, and how broad of a footprint the 

attacker has established. 

To this end, it is vital to have visibility into attack paths to essential assets and network activity that 

includes seeing devices coming on or off the network, and can they find shadow admin accounts? This 

sort of credential tracking is more important than ever and having the correct tools in place can stop the 

execution of a successful breach. Decoys can also record and replay attacks for a better correlation of 

attack activities and gathering company-specific threat intelligence. 

The spike in remote employees underscores the need to boost VPN security, as new traffic patterns amid 

remote work have shattered traditional activity baselines and made suspicious behavior harder to identify. 

This need also applies to cloud security as well, since much of the remote work uses PaaS, SaaS, and 

IaaS accounts to collaborate between sites. Decoys systems and accounts can also identify 

unauthorized attempts to gain credential or administrative access to the VPN network segment or cloud 

service, giving organizations visibility into suspicious activity in those areas. 

Active Directory is also a prime target, and the ability to track unauthorized AD queries from endpoints is 

critical. Attackers target AD because it contains all the information, objects, and accounts they need to 

compromise an enterprise network, and such activity is difficult to detect. Detection capabilities that alert 

on unauthorized queries and misinform attackers can be instrumental in derailing this form of attack. 

Layered Defenses Secure the Present and the Future 

To invoke a sports analogy, you can’t spike the football before you get to the end zone. There remains a 

legitimate likelihood that attackers are actively lurking in networks. The situation underscores the 

importance of layered defenses that forces attackers to jump as many hurdles as possible to conduct 

their attacks. Attackers have taken advantage of the unfamiliar remote working situation to enter 

corporate networks, so it is vital to have protections in place to detect their lateral movement within those 

networks and stop them before harm can be done. 




Carolyn holds the roles of Chief Deception Officer and CMO at Attivo 

Networks. She is a high-impact technology executive with over 30 years 

of experience in building new markets and successful enterprise 

infrastructure companies. She has a demonstrated track record of 

effectively taking companies from pre-IPO through to multi-billion-dollar 

sales and has held leadership positions at Cisco, Juniper Networks, 

Nimble Storage, Riverbed, and Seagate. Carolyn is recognized as a 

global thought leader in technology trends and for building strategies 

that connect technology with customers to solve difficult operations, 

digitalization, and security challenges. Her current focus is on breach 

risk mitigation by teaching organizations how to shift from a prevention-based cybersecurity infrastructure 

to one of an active security defense based on the adoption of deception technology. 



Cyber Security Market to Reach USD 400 Billion by 2026 

Cyber security market will be driven by rising demand for cyber protection as well as advanced network 

infrastructure security across enterprises. 

By Saloni Walimbe, Content Writer at Global Market Insights, Inc. 

According to Global Market Insights, Cyber Security Market is expected to exceed USD 400 billion by 

2026. The rising demand for cyber protection as well as advanced network infrastructure security across 

enterprises is set to drive cyber security market in the forthcoming timeframe. 

Furthermore, rising internet penetration and technological advancement are leading the enterprises to 

move to cloud-based business models. The established enterprises are investing majorly in cyber 

security solutions since widespread digitization throughout enterprises is prone to information breach and 

cyber threats. 

The organizations are also establishing infrastructure and network security solutions which includes 

internet protocols and firewalls. This further allows them to prevent possible monetary as well as nonmonetary 

losses like data storage devices and interconnected servers. 

The demand for products related to infrastructure protection is anticipated to grow substantially through 

2020-2026. Several organizations are adopting the BYOD work practice at a larger level in order to boost 

the business productivity and to provide flexibility to the employees. They are also adopting endpoint 

protection in order to stop any unauthenticated access and vulnerabilities to enterprise data resources 

by mobile devices. Subsequently, owing to huge penetration of cloud services, enterprises are further 

adopting cloud security solutions. 



Since the cloud business infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber risks, cloud security solutions allows the 

company to maintain efficient network operations by following set rules. They tend to manage the total 

network security and also prevents unauthenticated alterations over network. 

The adoption of cybersecurity solutions across SMEs is likely to grow over 15% CAGR through 2020- 

2026. The increasing number of cyber-attacks over small & medium enterprises along with rising 

monetary losses have further led to increasing adoption of cutting-edge security solutions. 

Furthermore, these enterprises have also embraced the BYOD guidelines to lessen the capital 

expenditure as well as enhance the productivities of employees. They are also making substantial 

investments in advanced security solution in order to secure their data, majorly because they are prone 

to data breaches and cyber threats. 

Cybersecurity products & services demand is increasing in the IT and Telecommunication organizations 

owing to the demand for protecting of personal sensitive data. The companies are adopting security 

solutions in efforts to protect their virtual information systems, servers, and data centers. This further 

helps them to alleviate cyber risks and also sense vulnerabilities at an early stage, thereby protecting 

from live attacks. In addition to this, the introduction of strict regulations from government authorities is 

impelling the cyber security market growth. 

The Europe cyber security market is likely to grow at a CAGR of over 15% by the end of the forecast 

timespan. Several enterprises functioning in banking sectors are increasingly adopting technologically 

advanced cybersecurity solutions. The private corporates and government enterprises have registered 

increasing number of cyberattacks. Additionally, private corporates and government authorities are also 

making collective efforts to stop such vulnerabilities. 

Citing an instance, European Central Bank collaborated with the members of Euro Cyber Resilience 

Board. The two together introduced the Cyber Information and Intelligence Sharing initiative, which 

focuses on detecting and preventing cyberattacks as well as enhancing the cybersecurity throughout 

financial institutions. 

The competitive landscape of the global cyber security market is inclusive of players such as Google 

LLC, Nokia Networks, Oracle Corporation, IBM Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Amazon Web 

Services, and others. 

Source: - https://www.gminsights.com/pressrelease/cyber-security-market 




Saloni Walimbe,An avid reader since childhood, Saloni is currently 

following her passion for content creation by penning down insightful 

articles relating to global industry trends, business, and trade & 

finance. With an MBA-Marketing qualification under her belt, she has 

spent two years as a content writer in the advertising field. Aside from 

her professional work, she is an ardent animal lover and enjoys 

movies, music and books in her spare time. 

Company Website: - https://www.gminsights.com/ 

Author Social Media URLs- 1) LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/saloni-walimbe-5929b99b/ 

2) Twitter - https://twitter.com/WalimbeSaloni 



COVID-19 And Security Team Cuts Are Costing Businesses 

in Cyber and Financial Risks 

By Samantha Humphries, security strategist, Exabeam 

With 71% of cyber professionals reporting increased threats since the COVID-19 pandemic started, are 

SOCs prepared to mitigate these threats? The Exabeam 2020 State of the SOC report revealed 40% of 

companies reported being understaffed, which puts additional strain on security teams and makes their 

jobs much more challenging. 

And our latest survey reveals that this problem is being exacerbated by the challenges of working from 

home, budget cuts and security team reductions. We received responses from 1,005 U.S. and U.K. 

cybersecurity professionals who manage and operate SOCs. Our study included CIOs (50%) and security 

analysts and practitioners from companies across 12 different industries. Employee size ran the gamut, 

although the majority (53%) had between 100-249 security professionals. 

The results paint a striking picture of SOC organizations trying to manage more significant security threats 

with fewer resources. 



Furloughs Are Commonplace Despite Increasing Threats 

Unfortunately, despite the increase in cyberthreats, our survey found three-quarters of organizations had 

to furlough members from the SOC team. About 50% had to furlough between 1-2 employees. The U.S. 

furloughed fewer SOC employees compared to their U.K. counterparts. 

Figure 1: Seventy-five percent of organizations had to furlough SOC staff. 



Soc Teams Impacted by Redundancies 

Overall, 68% of companies report having laid off staff members. The majority had between 1-3 employees 

laid off. U.S. SOCs had fewer layoffs compared to the U.K. SOCs. 

Figure 2: Almost 30% of companies laid off two staff members from their security teams. 



Many Companies Are Deferring New Hires 

Given the furlough and redundancy findings, it’s no surprise that 57% of the companies had to defer 

hiring since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. A higher percentage of U.S. companies (71%) delayed 

hiring compared to the U.K. with 42% deferring. 

Figure 3: Fifty-seven percent of organizations had to defer hiring. 



Security Tech Investments Also on Hold 

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only harmed people, but it also forced 60% of companies to defer 

investments in security technology, which were previously planned. The U.S. had a higher deferment 

rate of 68% compared to the U.K. rate of 51%. 

Figure 4: Nearly sixty percent of organizations had to defer investments in security technology previously 

planned. 



Cyberattacks Are Skyrocketing 

Unfortunately, only 18% of companies overall had not seen an increase in the number of cyberattacks 

since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Eighty-eight percent of U.S. companies reported seeing 

slightly more and considerably more attacks compared to 74% of U.K. organizations. 

Figure 5: Eighteen percent of organizations reported not having an increase in the number of 

cyberattacks since the beginning of COVID-19. 



Work from Home = New Challenges for Security Teams 

Remote work has presented challenges for many SOC staff members. No doubt reduced staff numbers 

made their jobs even more difficult. Respondents cited communications within their security team as the 

most significant challenge mitigating threats while working remotely, followed by communications with 

other IT departments. Twenty-nine percent reported difficulty investigating attacks. There was little 

significant variance in problems between U.S. and U.K. companies, although a higher percentage of U.S. 

companies 40% had more difficulty communicating with other IT teams compared to 22% in the U.K. 

Figure 6: Twenty-nine percent of organizations reported difficulty investigating attacks. 



Home Workers More Prone to Error 

The shift to WFH has harmed many employees’ mental states and their ability to do their jobs. Some of 

the biggest challenges working remotely included being more prone to making mistakes due to 

distractions in the house — 49%, increased blurring of the line between personal and operated computers 

and data — 42% and learning new tools — 39%. 

Figure 7: Forty-nine percent of security professionals were prone to making mistakes due to distractions 

in the home. 



Most Companies Continue to Use/Invest in Automation Tools 

With fewer SOC staff, automation tools are essential in mitigating security threats. Only 17% of 

companies decreased their use/investment in automation tools. Fifty-two percent reported neither 

increased/decreased use or investment. Only 8% of the U.S. reduced their use/investment in comparison 

to 26% of U.K. organizations. 

Figure 8: Seventeen percent of companies decreased their use/investment in automation tools. 



⅓ Of Companies Have Been Hit with A Successful Cyberattack During the Pandemic 

Thirty-three percent of overall companies reported encountering a successful cyberattack since the 

beginning of the pandemic. There were no significant variances between U.S. and U.K. companies 

Figure 9: Thirty-three percent of companies reported experiencing a successful cyberattack since the 

beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. 



Mitigation and Legal Costs Are the Top Consequence of Cyberattacks 

Companies reported several consequences of successful cyberattacks. The most common effect was 

mitigation and legal costs — 44%, followed by loss of business revenue — 41% and a negative impact 

on brand reputation — 41%. 

Figure 10: Forty-four percent of companies reported mitigation and legal costs were a consequence of 

successful cyberattacks. 



Cyberattacks Hitting Organizations in The Wallet 

Considering many organizations are seeing a financial impact due to the pandemic, the additional cost 

of a cyberattack could not come at a worse time. Regarding lost business revenue, our survey found in 

the U.S., 35% lost between $38K-63K, and 14% reached losses of $63K-95K; in the U.K., 40% lost 

between £30K-50K. In terms of the financial impact on a brand, in the U.K., 43% saw between £30K- 

50K in losses; in the U.S., 38% reported between $38K-63K in losses. Also, 7.5% in each region lost 

between £50K-75K or $63K-95K. 

Concerning the financial impact of legal and mitigation costs, in the U.K., 33% spent between £20K-40K; 

in the U.S., approximately 30% spent between $38K-63K, and for 11 % the costs hit the $63K-95K range. 

DOWNTIME IS PROMINENT TOO 

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, 97% of companies experienced downtime between 1-4 

hours. Fortunately, only 3% reported downtime higher than four hours. 

Figure 11: Only 3% percent of companies experienced downtime greater than four hours. 



The findings from our survey clearly show many SOCs have to manage a much more significant number 

of cyberthreats with a leaner staff. Exabeam is committed to helping you and your SOC get through the 

COVID pandemic. Here are a few resources to help: 

● Webinar: SOC-from-home. Actionable Insights for Security Practitioners 

● Blog Series: Securing Your Remote Workforce 

● Webinar: Adapting Security Programs for an Unprecedented Future 


Samantha has 20 years of experience in cyber security. She has defined 

strategy for multiple security products and technologies, helped 

hundreds of organisations of all shapes, sizes, and geographies recover 

and learn from cyberattacks, and trained anyone who’ll listen on security 

concepts and solutions. She authors articles for various security 

publications, and is a regular speaker and volunteer at industry events, 

including BSides, IPExpo, CyberSecurityX, The Diana Initiative, and 

Blue Team Village (DEFCON)." 

Samantha can be reached online at shumphries@exabeam.com and at https://exabeam.com 



Cybersecurity Challenges When Working from Home 

By Renuka Sahane, Sr. Content Writer, Scalefusion 

Maintaining the security of corporate data when employees work remotely in the new normal. 

IT governance and cybersecurity have gained much-needed attention in the enterprise 

environment, thanks to the exponentially growing number of digital devices used in the 

workplace. The need to access the internet and intuitive apps that sit on mobile devices used 

across all industries is rapidly growing. From conventionally operating businesses such as retail 

to technology-driven businesses that are into manufacturing or supply chain, technology has 

touched based and revamped operations from the top to bottom. 

The era of remote working 

And just when the businesses globally were finding and implementing solid strategies to secure 

corporate devices and data from unknown threats and cybersecurity challenges, the pandemic 

hit. COVID-19 pushed all businesses- even the ones without a mobility strategy into a new 



normal that not everyone was prepared to endure. Remote working caught up, first out of 

hesitation, then out of need and now looks like it’s here to stay. 

For companies that had strong strategies in place before moving to remote working, the 

transition was easy but for those that did not have policies and security protocols in place, the 

change has been a real challenge. Employees have no choice but to work from home and 

companies have no option but to facilitate the same. Ensuring work-friendly devices are available 

to the employees to upkeep the business performance and employee productivity has been the 

primary concern of business leaders. 

Equally daunting are the security concerns and cybersecurity challenges that might arise when 

employees work from home, for an indefinite period. When the employees and the devices they 

use to exit the physical boundaries of the office, they are essentially out of the security posture 

of the company. 

Cybersecurity challenges during remote working 

Unmanaged devices, routers, printers, and other devices 

If the employees working from home have not been provided with provisioned and managed 

devices including laptops, desktops, and tablets, they choose to opt for personal devices for 

work. Unless the company has a BYOD management policy in place and can enable security 

restrictions on the work container or profile of these devices, the device usage is safe and can 

in fact help add to the employee productivity, since they use their favorite devices for work. But 

if the devices are unmanaged and yet the employee is accessing work resources, corporate and 

user data on these devices, the data is practically exposed to every possible cybersecurity threat 

there is- from apps, websites, and unmonitored personal communication and collaboration tools. 

Moreso, the devices are invariably connected to an internet router, peripherals such as printers. 

Work calls happen in the presence of family/roommates and there are home automation systems 

and bots eavesdropping on every work-related conversation. Clearly, the security protocols are 

dull, if not faded during remote working. 

How secure is home WiFi and/or VPN? 

This has been a serious concern for organizations that haven’t extended secure internet hotspot 

devices for employees to connect to while working remotely. The security of personal WiFi is 

highly questionable, especially when it is accessed by multiple users for personal use. Home 

networks commonly have the WEP protocols, which are known to be weaker, paving the way 

for cybercriminals to walk into your data and devices. 



Also, while VPN might look like the best option for providing network security via encryption, if 

the VPN connects to any of the compromised devices, for example, the personal tablet of the 

employee, the hackers can crawl in the gaps created. It is important to ensure endpoint 

authentication to VPN access via certificate management, for instance, to ensure that only 

managed/work devices are connected to such networks. Needless to say, monitoring the VPN 

security at all times, recognizing potential failures, and extending support via patch management 

is crucial. 

It is also important to note that if the employees are using legacy PCs, managing them outside 

of the corporate network or via VPN is practically impossible. In such cases, quickly procuring 

the latest tech by leasing or leveraging ‘desktop as a service’ can be a good option. 

Phishers taking advantage of emotional vulnerabilities 

Reports of increased phishing scams since the COVID-19 pandemic are surfacing. People are 

vulnerable, anxious and it is a tough time for all. The employees are susceptible to click on 

malicious emails that appear to be from government agencies, healthcare bodies, or WHO or 

might give away critical personal data to healthcare-related apps that are not authorized. 



What companies can do... 

Start with a robust policy to maintain security for remote working. Manage employee-owned as 

well as corporate-owned devices with an EMM solution and exercise access control, manage 

website access, and add security to corporate content with extensive policy configurations. Be 

on the top of the device security and rectify potential threats quickly. 

And most importantly, build a culture of security among your employees and train them on the 

best practices. Your corporate data is only as safe as your employees want it to be. Go beyond 

device policies to educate your employees on the importance of data and cybersecurity 


Renuka Shahane is a Sr. Content Writer at Scalefusion -a leading Mobile 

Device Management solution. Renuka is keen in learning new trends 

surrounding cybersecurity, repercussions of remote working and the 

evolution of enterprise mobility. You can read more of her work at 

https://blog.scalefusion.com/. 



Network Security Is Not Data Security 

Data is an organization’s most valuable asset, yet data loss is one of the biggest repercussions of a 

cyber-attack. 

By Matt Cable, VP Solutions Architects & MD Europe, Certes Networks 

Data is an organization’s most valuable asset, yet data loss is one of the biggest repercussions of a cyber 

attack. In 2019, more than 15 billion records were exposed in data breaches, amounting to more than 

$3.5 billion lost to cyber crime. 

Moreover, the unprecedented events of recent months in 2020 have seen the number of attempted data 

breaches continue to rise, with cyber hackers taking advantage of remote working and individuals’ fears 

over COVID-19. In fact, a survey showed that 50% of organizations were unable to guarantee that their 

data was adequately secured when being used by remote workers. 

There is clearly a lot at stake. Organizations need to protect their data, but they also need a robust data 

assurance solution. Data assurance, or information assurance, is a challenge due to the many networking 

technologies deployed in today’s environments, making policies disjointed due to differing technology 

and network infrastructures, as well as data regulations driving data security. 



Regulatory compliance is becoming more complex, and each regulatory policy widens the scope for 

required data security controls, often resulting in point solutions, added complexity and the loss of network 

visibility. 

Therefore, strict separation of duties is a core compliance requirement to ensure there is no risk of 

network policy interfering with data security policy; but this is often difficult to enforce when security is 

tied to infrastructure. 

So, how can organizations secure their data, even when the network isn’t secure to begin with? And how 

can they ensure the security posture is always visible in order to ensure their data is always secure? 

Simon Hill, Director Sales Operations at Certes Networks explains why a five-step approach is essential 

to keep a customer’s data secure. 

The Five Step Approach to Data Assurance as a Business Strategy 

Due to increasing pressures to keep data secure, securing data as it travels across the network has never 

been more important. Encryption is certainly one way to keep data secure as it travels across the network, 

but it is not as simple as just deploying an encryption solution. Organizations must follow these five steps. 

1. Convert data assurance requirements into an intent-based policy. This is then used to configure and 

enforce the required security parameters for sensitive data. 

2. Creating multiple polices, one for each data classification or regulation, not only ensures that data is 

protected at all times, but with each policy using its own keys, customers are creating micro-segments 

using strong cryptography or crypto-segments. These crypto-segments keep data flows protected 

using separate keys and also provide critical protection against the lateral movement of threats. 

3. Organizations must look at the requirements of their environment. Whether it is low latency 

applications, high throughput data requirements or rapidly changing network environments, 

organizations must have the flexibility and scalability to secure any environment to meet the depth 

and breadth of their organization’s needs. 

4. Organizations also need full network visibility without compromising data security. With traditional 

encryption blinding the network and security operations tools, monitoring, troubleshooting, adds, 

moves, or changes are made difficult without first turning encryption off. An encryption technology 

solution should enable the network to look and work in the same way after deployment as it did before, 

enabling all networking and security functions even while data is being protected. 

5. Lastly, with a data assurance strategy, organizations can benefit from a real-time view of their data 

security posture, graphically showing data security performance at all times. An observability tool or 

a third-party security dashboard can ensure rapid detection, response and remediation of nonconformance 

and provide evidence as part of any required audit. Organizations using Artificial 



Intelligence can also take advantage of the programmable interfaces when using a dynamic program 

with a security overlay, which reduces the time to remediation and removes the need for manual 

intervention when threats are detected within the security stack. 

Confidence in Data Assurance 

The goal of a data assurance solution should be high confidence with low impact, and the ability to scale 

to the needs of an organization with, for example, a zero-impact software-defined overlay and real-time 

reporting of policy conformance to achieve this. 

Taking a software-defined approach truly delivers on true separation of duties, enabling security teams 

to retain control of the data security posture at all times without compromising network performance or 

the agility needed so that applications teams can be effective. 

Furthermore, with a robust data security strategy, organizations can quickly turn their data cyber 

assurance requirements into intent-based policy which can be monitored in real time to ensure roundthe-clock 

visibility of their data assurance posture. Whether one data classification or multiple, securing 

data using crypto-segmentation to micro-segment data flows, protects against the lateral movement of 

threats whilst also ensuring all data is secure in motion. 

Armed with this five-step approach, organizations can take actionable steps not only gain a deep 

understanding of how to enhance their security posture and to manage and enforce policies but to 

measure the effectiveness of their security strategy. When securing data vs. securing the network is the 

priority, data loss can be prevented and data security can truly be seen as a strategic contributor to the 

organization’s success. 


Matt Cable is VP Solutions Architect and MD 

Europe, Certes Networks. Matt is a Cyber-Security and 

Cryptography expert with more than 20 years of consultancy 

experience that covers IT Strategy and Enterprise. 

Matt can be reached on LinkedIn here - 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattcable72/ - and at our company 

website www.certesnetworks.com 



WireGuard - Separating Fact from Fiction 

By Tomislav Čohar, co-founder, hide.me VPN 

Offering high speeds, excellent levels of security and a low footprint, WireGuard has rightly caused ripples 

within the VPN industry. WireGuard is an open-source protocol that employs cutting-edge cryptography 

and provides fierce competition for the likes of IPsec and OpenVPN. As a user then, what advances can 

you expect from WireGuard? Has this protocol been over-hyped and are we just seeing a flurry of smoke 

and mirrors from a biased media? 

WireGuard certainly offers a lower footprint - it was made to be as lightweight as possible and can be 

implemented with just a few thousand lines of code. The resulting reduced attack surface is certainly a 

benefit and also makes auditing the code a much more straightforward process. Users enjoy the benefits 

of being able to switch seamlessly from something like Wi-FI to 4G LTE due to WireGuard’s built-in 

roaming capabilities. Also, WireGuard uses your network more adroitly than other VPN protocols. With a 

mere 32 bytes overhead, it trumps other protocols that use much more space for their signaling. As a 

user, you get more space for your data with higher throughput. 

WireGuard is a remarkably fast protocol that doesn’t skimp on security. This is thanks to the use of 

modern and efficient cryptography constructs. WireGuard works from within the Linux kernel meaning 

that it can process data faster, eliminating much of the latency associated with other protocols. Keeping 



on the security track, with WireGuard being a more recent addition compared to the likes of OpenVPN, it 

has benefitted from being built from the ground up to support more modern encryption methods and hash 

functions. 

Telling it straight 

Taking all of these benefits into account, recent media coverage and some claims have certainly been a 

cause to raise eyebrows. Let’s take a look at just a few of the myths that have been circulating in recent 

weeks and months so that you can better understand exactly what WireGuard can deliver. 

Fixed IP address 

So does WireGuard insist that each device on the network get a fixed IP address? No, not really. In fact, 

it doesn’t really demand anything and largely performs in a similar fashion to any other protocol; operating 

as a versatile cryptographic piece of a larger puzzle called a VPN tunnel. It's more useful to think about 

how you manage it. If you use a simple or rigid setup, this requires static IPs on the servers. However, it 

can be managed in a more dynamic fashion. WireGuard is able to perform just like any other VPN protocol 

by adding IPs when they're needed and getting rid of them as soon as the VPN session is concluded. 

Server Communication and data exchange 

Can WireGuard offer a considerable change to the way servers communicate with each other? 

Again, not really, it operates in a similar fashion to all the other protocols. What about the exchange and 

verification of data? Is it the case that WireGuard sticks to strong but simple ways of exchanging and 

verifying data? In fact, WireGuard only supports one method of key exchange. There is only support for 

one AEAD. Other protocols support a profusion of cryptosystems but tend to settle on AES. AES is not 

flawed, no exploit has been found yet. Also, AES256 cipher is cryptographically stronger than ChaCha20 

which is used by WireGuard. However, It is computationally expensive when compared to ChaCha20. 

ChaCha20 offers the best bang for the buck. One could argue that Poly1305 MAC is stronger than 

GHASH, but then again we come to the point of the whole AES-GCM construct being supported in Intel’s 

hardware. 

Internet Speed 

When we talk about who is quick and who is slow, are other protocols more sluggish than WireGuard? 

Would you see a dramatic increase in speed by adopting WireGuard? Essentially, some VPN protocols 

are slower, but this is almost entirely down to circumstances and not really related to crypto. If you are 

connecting through a dialup modem, for example, then speedy crypto becomes a moot point. Additionally, 

if you are a provider that supports much faster protocols then WireGuard isn't going to be able to deliver 

on impressive speed promises. 

Our measurements show that OpenVPN usually outperforms WireGuard by at least 10 percent (on the 

Windows platform when WinTUN driver is used and when the OS is running on an Intel CPU. On Linux, 

again on an Intel CPU, WireGuard outperforms OpenVPN significantly (by more than 40%), but it is still 

significantly slower than IPSec (by more than 10 percent). These measurements were performed on an 

1 Gigabit LAN since such a speed is commercially available for our customers. On 10 Gigabit Ethernet, 

OpenVPN pales in comparison with WireGuard as it is about 10 times slower. IPSec, on the other hand, 

outperforms WireGuard by more than 30 percent when AES is used as a symmetric algorithm. 



Running in-kernel 

Can you achieve the highest possible performance just by running in-kernel? Not really - actually, IPSec 

is way faster on all platforms. IPSec runs much faster because it runs in the kernel too, but is significantly 

more optimised for Intel CPUs. The point is, running within the kernel offers a major speed increase but 

WireGuard is not the only protocol to run in such a way. PPTP/L2TP do too. OpenVPN developers plan 

to release a kernel module for Linux soon. SoftEther (which runs completely in the userspace) 

outperforms WireGuard when throughput is the primary concern. 

WireGuard definitely warrants all of the interest it has garnered - it remains to be seen whether it becomes 

a revolution for the VPN industry. As things stand it certainly offers faster speeds and better reliability 

compared to some of the existing VPN protocols - and there is the added promise of new and improved 

encryption standards. It is surely only a matter of time before we see more and more VPN services 

incorporating WireGuard into their structure. 


Tomislav Čohar is the co-founder of hide.me VPN. 

https://hide.me/en/ 



Conducting Risk Prioritization and Remediation to 

Combat Challenges in The Distributed Workforce 

By Egon Rinderer, Global Vice President of Technology and Federal CTO, Tanium 

Most agencies have successfully met initial telework surge requirements – putting the basics in place to 

continue essential operations. Recent research found approximately 90 percent of federal employees 

now telework and 76 percent feel they will be able to telework at least part-time in the future. With the 

basics now in place, the next priority for every IT team is a careful assessment of cyber risks, current 

protections, and what is needed to keep systems and data safe in an environment with exponentially 

more endpoints in more places. 

Data residing on endpoint devices operating beyond the agency network perimeter isn’t all that’s at risk– 

if compromised, those devices can also be used by malicious actors to tamper with or steal sensitive data 

on the agency’s enterprise network. As the number of devices outside of the protected network grows, 

the attack surface expands and risk increases. 



The reality is that many organizations were already struggling with basic cyber hygiene before the 

telework surge – and most of the security tools implemented were designed for local enterprises. With a 

distributed workforce, this means increased cyber risk, as the security tools in place become even less 

effective. 

In this new environment, federal IT teams should focus on risk prioritization and remediation – identifying 

and addressing the vulnerabilities that pose the highest risk and could have the biggest negative impact 

on the agency and its mission. 

Performing Risk Prioritization and Remediation 

Almost half of federal agencies say the new distributed workforce has affected the execution of projects 

and over one-quarter feel planning for the next fiscal year has been delayed. April and May were months 

of change, and June is predicted to be a catch up month. Demand and expectations for real-time 

information and IT support from customers are up, so agencies must be prepared. 

Risk prioritization can help IT teams evaluate the infrastructure beyond data vulnerabilities to help 

determine which vulnerabilities to patch and assess an endpoint’s security level – which can dramatically 

change the risk level. By prioritizing risks, security teams can more effectively allocate their already 

limited resources to focus on mission critical tasks. 

However, IT teams now have to consider the degrees of separation between each endpoint in context. 

In addition to the connectivity to the enterprise network, there’s often connectivity to other endpoints, the 

applications and users authenticated to each, and the rights and privileges conveyed through such 

mechanisms as AD group membership. Even if one endpoint is completely secure, a user profile on 

another more vulnerable endpoint could provide an access point for lateral movement into the entire 

network. Given that these factors and variables can change by the second in a large enterprise, a 

quarterly, monthly or even weekly risk assessment is insufficient. 

Often, the security problems that agencies are facing are oversimplified, and vendors can only provide 

partial solutions to help; they run a vulnerability assessment and receive a risk score from systems such 

as the industry standard Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), helping them assess and rank 

their vulnerability management processes. However, while risk scoring systems such as these combine 

several types of data in order to provide the vulnerability risk score, they aren’t always based on real time 

data and the results are only as good as the data that’s input. 

Vendors have completed a piece of the puzzle by diagnosing vulnerabilities and identifying threats, but 

have to now take into consideration the millions of risk scores across millions of endpoints – some of 

which are unknown – trying to access the network and the context of the relationship between these 

endpoints over time. 

The lack of complete visibility into the network leaves many vulnerabilities unknown and makes risk 

assessments little more than guesswork for IT teams – increasing the likelihood of a breach. Risk scores 

are living, breathing things and, especially in the new teleworking environment, must be based on real 

time data to protect the agency’s environment and overall mission. 



Connectivity Hurdles 

Now that agencies have established basic connectivity, the focus has shifted to optimizing connections 

and improving security. There are a variety of approaches – some agencies have deemed split tunnel 

virtual private networks (VPNs) too risky, opting for full tunnel VPNs where both user and management 

traffic flow through the same channel. While this approach can achieve the short-term goal of 

establishing and maintaining secure connectivity, it also has unintended consequences. 

Using full tunnel VPNs can lead to slow response times, causing employees to disconnect from the VPN 

altogether. When this happens, IT teams are blind to those devices and they don’t get routine patches, 

making them increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks. While these endpoints used to enjoy the added 

protection of an existence behind the protective boundary of the enterprise network perimeter, they are 

now isolated in an uncontrolled environment with only their point tools protecting them and active 

management and visibility only afforded while connected to the VPN. 

BYOD has added another layer of risk and complexity, with many employees turning to personal devices 

to continue working. However, there’s often a discrepancy between not just the out of the box tools that 

reside on an individual’s personal device and their work computer, but also the security tools loaded and 

managed on each. And, when these BYOD devices only have periodic connectivity to the agency 

network, cyber criminals no longer have to penetrate a multi-layered protected perimeter to get into the 

main server. They can use the unprotected device as an entry point into the network. 

A holistic approach helps enable improved visibility and control over the network, regardless of where an 

asset is located. The challenge is that decisions about connectivity, endpoint security, and perimeter 

security are often made in a vacuum by those independent teams responsible for each versus a combined 

solution. With a holistic approach in mind, teams can understand what is impacting the agency’s risk, 

mitigate each risk for the time being, and remediate it for the long-term. 

The Next Phase 

As agencies look to the future, operations will not resume as in times past and budgets will be 

impacted. Agencies must consider the sustainability of solutions long-term, specifically in terms of 

mitigation of the inherent risk a distributed workforce carries. They should be pragmatic in their future 

plans, having ideological discussions around assessing and measuring risk, dealing with steps to mitigate 

risks, and finding cost-effective ways to address risk and secure the network. IT teams need to be data 

driven and look at the validity of the data agencies are working with. 

Agencies must build a foundation for assessing and addressing risk based on real time data to maintain 

business and mission continuity amid a risk landscape that’s changed dramatically and irrevocably. 

It may seem impossible to get a hold of the amount of data needed quickly enough to make good risk 

decisions. But, it’s not impossible – it’s being done today. With the new levels and types of risk that arise 

from this remote environment, it is critical to set aside traditional risk assessments and protections and 

start looking at risk pragmatically. Agencies must take a hard look at existing tools and how they are 

hamstrung when dealing with remote endpoints - and consider replacing those legacy tools/platforms 

that fall short. 




Egon Rinderer is the Global Vice President of Technology and 

Federal CTO at Tanium. With 30 years of Federal and private sector 

industry experience, Egon currently leads the global Enterprise 

Services Organization as well as leading Tanium Federal as Chief 

Technology Officer. Joining Tanium at a time when the company 

was made up of less than 20 employees, he has held roles ranging 

from Technical Account Manager to Federal Pod Lead to global Vice 

President of the TAM organization. Prior to joining Tanium, Egon 

was with Intel Corporation and served throughout the US military 

and intelligence community in the United States and abroad in an 

operational capacity. Egon can be reached at 

egon.rinderer@tanium.com, online at 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/egon-rinderer/, or at our company 

website at https://www.tanium.com/solutions/federal-government/ 



Can We Better Leverage Our – Already Scarce – Cyber 

Security Human Resources? 

By Douglas Ferguson, Founder & CTO, Pharos Security 

It is accepted that there is a significant cyber security skills deficit. The result, it is argued, is that cyber 

security teams do not have access to the human resources they need to be successful. Therefore, CISOs 

and security teams cannot effectively protect their organization from cyber breach and impact. Often left 

unsaid is that cyber security teams often undermine themselves by poorly calibrating and pitching 

resource requirements and inadequately leveraging available expertise. 

Security can be described, in simple terms, like a wall. Where the height corresponds to the level of threat 

sophistication security can counter, the width corresponds to coverage, and the depth corresponds to 

types of control (predict, protect, detect, respond, recover). Each of these dimensions strongly influence 

the costs of a security program – and the ability to control breach outcomes vs. different types and 

sophistications of attack. 

Not enough expertise 

These are two key issues surrounding perceived expertise shortages: 

1. The over reliance on high-end expertise 

2. The suboptimal leverage of adequate expertise 



Countless times I have seen an organization lament the ability to find high-end security experts to anchor 

and properly design and implement high – believed – priority security controls. Often, when high-profile 

experts are brought in, these controls become an ivory tower and a significant resource hog usurping 

resources for less flashy, more commodity, but critical foundational controls. Unfortunately, much more 

common and commodity skills are deemphasized, and sub optimally leveraged to build out the more 

mundane, but foundational, security controls. 

What has happened in the above case is an over reliance on high-end expertise (as saviours) to 

compensate for lack of an effective threat and cost calibrated cyber security strategy and unbalanced 

SecOps. This results in unexpectedly weak overall protection performance, which is why we see, again 

and again, security breaches at high profile organizations that have lots of security budget, technology, 

and experts. 

It is analogous to many professional sports teams that overspend on a few superstars, to the detriment 

of having enough budget to pay for supporting players. Because you win as a team, the superstar’s value 

is frittered away when their skill is relied on to carry the team, rather than a cohesive team strategy. The 

1980 Olympic hockey Miracle on Ice is a classic example of US teamwork triumphing over the collection 

of Soviet superstars for the gold medal. 

Effective security strategy follows a process like learning to crawl, then walk, then run. You must first be 

able to control low sophistication threats (like accidents and mischief) before you try to protect against 

hackers before you then should even consider trying to control espionage and nation states. 

The reality is, high-end cyber security expertise is rarely required for the bulk of foundational SecOps 

implementation and operation; rather, strong planning, threat, resource and cost calibration, project 

management, and measurement of SecOps KPIs aligned to pragmatic protection goals is what is needed. 

There is a time for high-end expertise – in initial strategic planning and then advanced tactics – but never 

to cover up for lack of these. 

Not enough budget 

We often experience budget requests denied or reduced because of headcount unit costs, or quantity 

requested – and sometimes location. How do we justify these costs in a pragmatic way? 

The fundamental question to answer is: “What are we trying to achieve?” Because to answer that is to 

control cost variables. And human resource costs vary by skills sophistication, with more advanced skills 

being rarer and more expensive. You only need to pay for these when the time is right. 

In the eyes of executive leadership – those that ultimately approve budgets - security teams today do an 

inadequate job calibrating and articulating necessary levels, quantity, and location of specific skills. 

Because the cost of these skills varies depending on the security wall dimensions introduced above, 

security budgets are often uncalibrated with overspend and underspend. The conclusion drawn by many 



executives is that security is a necessary evil because it is very difficult to measure budget performance 

and protection outcomes. 

Lack of cyber security ‘common sense’ 

We often hear that ‘humans are the weak link in cyber security’ – usually meaning that they do ‘stupid 

things’ that unintentionally help hackers. Security controls (e.g. people, process, technology) exist to 

control security outcomes. They are largely intended to control humans from doing something or having 

access to something. When we blame humans as the weakest link, we are simply pointing out that 

controls do not effectively control desired security outcomes. Largely, the people to blame here are not 

the ‘general workforce and public’ but the security practitioners whose job it is to produce controlled and 

expected outcomes. And for the challenges of effectively calibrating, gaining access to, and leveraging 

required skills, they are often the victims of their own vicious cycle. 

Programmatic and control cyber security performance is challenged because humans are the weakest 

link, just not in the way that cyber security experts are pointing their fingers. 


Douglas Ferguson, a security professional of over 

20 years, is the Founder and CTO of Pharos 

Security. Pharos specializes in aligning security 

goals and strategy to the business and a calibrated 

risk appetite, ensuring an integrated business plan 

and optimized operations build that to plan and on 

budget. 

Prior to Pharos, Ferguson was with Barclays Bank in London, where he was responsible for numerous 

security programs and initiatives across more than 40 countries. Previously, Ferguson was a Managing 

Consultant and researcher on the acclaimed X-Force at Internet Security Systems. He delivered security 

services to more than 200 clients globally and was a co-creator of the breakthrough System Scanner 

technology. Douglas can be reached online at dferguson@pharossecurity.com and the Pharos website: 

https://pharossecurity.com/ 



CERT Warns Bad Actors Are Targeting Remote Access – 

How Security Operations Find and Route These “Below 

the Radar” Attacks 

New Ransomware/Exfiltration Campaign Targeting Remote Access Resists Resolution Through Data 

Restoration 

By Saryu Nayyar, CEO, Gurucul 

Remote access tools, such as VPN’s, RDP, VNC, Citrix, and others, have always been an inviting target 

for attackers. Even 2003’s Matrix Reloaded used an exploit against an old version of Secure Shell (SSH) 

as a plot device in a rare cinematic example of a real-world cyber-security threat. The recent shift to a 

remote workforce in response to a global pandemic has made remote access an even more inviting target 

for threat actors of all stripes. 

As a recent report from New Zealand’s CERT pointed out, malicious actors are actively focusing on 

remote access vectors, using a range of attack techniques. While unpatched systems are an ongoing 

issue, attackers are also targeting weak authentication schemes, including a notable lack of two-factor 

authentication. The users themselves are also a primary target. Targeted email such as spear phishing, 

which goes for a specific target, or cast-netting, that targets people within a single organization, have a 

history of success and have seen a noticeable rise. 



Fortunately, information security professionals still have a range of tools and techniques they can use to 

help prevent breaches and to mitigate them when they do happen. 

Many attack scenarios, especially ones involving remote access attacks, start with targeting the users 

themselves. Many penetration testers will tell you the users are the easiest target and the first thing 

they’ll go after. But this also gives an organization the opportunity to convert their user base from part of 

the attack surface into their first line of defense. Making sure you have trained them on best practices 

and have enabled a strong multi-factor authentication scheme can go a long way to preventing 

unauthorized access. 

For many organizations, the Security Operations team, rather than their users, is the main line of 

defense. Even when the services are provided whole, or in part, by a third party, they are the ones who 

have the ultimate responsibility for the organization’s security well-being. Which means assuring they 

have the correct tools and the right training is as important as making sure the users are trained and 

equipped. The question becomes whether they have the right tools and training to identify and mitigate 

attack profiles that have now shifted to target the remote workforce. 

The threats they have been historically focused on have not disappeared, but they may no longer be the 

primary attack surface. Likewise, the tools they use to identify and mitigate attacks may not be the best 

ones now that the attacker’s focus has shifted. 

Threat actors have become increasingly skilled at compromising systems and then hiding their activity 

“below the radar” to avoid detection, which makes their activity harder to detect. More so now that they 

have a remote workforce to both target for attack and use for concealment. That means the SecOps 

team will need to look at the situation holistically rather than relying on single indicators of compromise. 

To that end, an advanced security analytics platform that can consolidate all the organization’s security 

data into a single place and then perform AI-based analytics the entirety of the data may be in order. By 

looking at all the information, it is possible to identify anomalous behavior that differs subtly from what’s 

expected, or accepted, for a normal user. That can be the first indication of a compromise. Using 

machine learning techniques, the system can adapt to the changing threat surface and present a riskbased 

assessment to the SecOps team. 

Combined with their existing tools and efficient automation, security operations personnel can get ahead 

of an attack to keep a single compromised account or remote access system from escalating to a serious 

data breach. 




Saryu Nayyar is the CEO of Gurucul. She is an 

internationally recognized cybersecurity expert, author 

and speaker with more than 15 years of experience in the 

information security, identity and access management, IT 

risk and compliance, and security risk management 

sectors. She was named EY Entrepreneurial Winning 

Women in 2017. She has held leadership roles in security 

products and services strategy at Oracle, Simeio, Sun 

Microsystems, Vaau (acquired by Sun) and Disney, and held senior positions in the technology security 

and risk management practice of Ernst & Young. She is passionate about building disruptive technologies 

and has several patents pending for behavior analytics, anomaly detection and dynamic risk scoring 

inventions. 

Saryu can be reached on Twitter at @Gurucul 



4 Simple Ways to Repel Ransomware as The Rise in 

Remote Work Continues 

By Kris Lahiri, Co-founder and Chief Security Officer of Egnyte 

Ransomware attacks are now the most common security incident taking place today. According to a 

recent report from TrustWave, ransomware rates quadrupled in 2019, accounting for one out of every 

five security incidents and unseating payment card theft as the most prevalent threat category. This spike 

in ransomware couldn’t come at a worse time, as companies all over the world are grappling with many 

operational and security challenges associated with the coronavirus-induced shift to remote work. 

Why is this such a problem? IT and security leaders are generally all too aware of this threat and wellequipped 

to defend against it in conventional business environments. But with the vast majority of 

employees working from home, the traditional network perimeter has evaporated and so have many 

foundational security protections. For a 1,000 person company that’s become 100% remote, 

administrators now have 1,000 mini networks to protect against this onslaught of ransomware attacks 

instead of one or several – but without the same level of control or defenses. And unfortunately the tried 

and true method of simply implementing backup and recovery policies to safeguard against successful 

ransomware infections isn’t as practical or realistic with a massively distributed, off-network workforce. 



Luckily there are several best practices beyond general endpoint protections and malware defenses that 

every security administrator can and should implement today to protect remote workers from this threat. 

Here are four keys to securing your off-network employees and fending off ransomware attacks as the 

COVID-19 pandemic continues: 

1. Implement ransomware education and training – According to Verizon, 80% of reported 

security incidents involve phishing, and according to one report, phishing attacks are to blame for 

two-thirds of successful ransomware infections in 2019. Although remote employees are not “on 

their own” as they work from home, they are further away from your skilled IT and security staff 

and must be trained to independently identify and avoid potential ransomware attacks. 

Regardless of the size of your organization, invest in educational programs and regular training 

that teach employees about common ransomware delivery techniques and red flags to watch out 

for. Better yet, incorporate regular practical tests that entice users into clicking on would-be 

malicious links or downloads, and provide additional training as needed. Investing in ransomware 

education and training is well worth it when you consider the potential financial and reputational 

damage caused by a breach. 

2. Strengthen data access policies – Now that the majority of your workforce is operating outside 

the office network perimeter, it’s never been more critical to tightly control permissions. Create 

strict identity and access policies and buttress your access control lists so you can limit employee 

access to areas of your infrastructure in which you’re storing valuable company data and content. 

Shoring up these policies will allow you to enable or deny permissions by account, user, or based 

on specific elements such as date, time, IP address, or whether requests are sent with SSL/TLS. 

Use the principle of least privilege, only giving users access to the accounts, systems and data 

that’s absolutely necessary for them to be productive. This is a crucial step when it comes to 

ensuring attackers or unauthorized parties can’t get access to, delete or expose your businesscritical 

data. 

3. Require multi-factor authentication – It goes without saying that you should put in place policies 

that require users to set complex passwords that are 16 characters at a minimum. That said, even 

strong passwords are no longer enough when it comes to secure authentication. Given enough 

time, a simple brute force attack can crack highly complex credentials. Deploying a multi-factor 

authentication solution should be a no-brainer for every organization today, especially with so 

many employees accessing company data from outside the enterprise perimeter. A second or 

third authentication factor delivers another critical layer of protection, so that even if an attacker 

gets their hands on a weak or stolen employee password, they’ll be unable to log in and 

compromise your systems without a physical token, personal smartphone or unique biometric 

signature. 

4. Reexamine and harden the compute layer – If you haven’t already, now is the time to assess 

and secure your compute layer to ensure your systems and data remain available and to keep 

any threat actors that could potentially find a way in through one of many remote entry points from 

using your resources to spread malware. One easy way to do this is to remove outdated or 

unnecessary programs from user devices, which just offer additional attack surfaces for bad 



actors to target. Ensure that all user devices are updated and patched automatically, or as 

frequently as possible. While these measures can’t provide 100% protection against zero-days, 

they can significantly reduce your risk. Additionally, take time to adjust your hypervisor firewall 

rules. This is important because you can manage both ingress and egress traffic to set granular 

rules for which users can send, receive and access both inbound and outbound data, as well as 

how much and which types. Setting strict outbound rules is incredibly important here due to the 

fact that ransomware attacks often threaten to leak confidential company data. 

Our research shows that exposure of just a single terabyte of data could cost you $129,324; now think 

about how many terabytes of data your organization stores today. Most companies end up storing 

hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of files, many of which are highly valuable and critical to 

business operations. Ransomware attacks continue to wreak havoc on companies of all types and sizes 

by locking those assets away as leverage for cyber extortion. Even though there are advanced solutions 

out there that can allow you to simply roll back your environment to a pre-attack state and restore all files 

to the last unaffected version, a widely distributed workforce can make this much more challenging (and 

increase the odds of reinfection without the proper preventative measures in place). 

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to play out over the coming months, attackers will focus their 

attention on the many new targets supplied by the burgeoning population of remote workers – just hoping 

that they’re unprepared and unprotected enough to make for easy footholds into your organization. The 

most effective approach is to prevent ransomware infections before they can inflict damage. 

Implementing the above best practices today will help you better secure off-network employees if and 

when ransomware comes calling. 


Kris Lahiri is a co-founder and the Chief Security Officer of Egnyte. 

He is responsible for creating and implementing Egnyte's global 

information security and compliance management strategies, 

policies and controls that protect all of Egnyte's customers' 

content and users. Prior to Egnyte, Kris spent many years in the 

design and deployment of large-scale infrastructures for Fortune 

100 customers of Valdero and KPMG Consulting. Kris has a 

B.Tech in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, 

Banaras, and an MS from the University of Cincinnati. For more 

information, visit: https://www.egnyte.com. 



Ransomware, Risk, And Recovery 

Why You Need to Take A Hard Look At Your Corporate Recovery Plan 

By Mickey Bresman, CEO, Semperis 

What we as IT and security professionals worry about when planning for disaster recovery has evolved 

over time. 

At first, the major concerns were natural (e.g. hurricanes) or man-made (power failure) physical disasters. 

After 9/11, we included other physical disasters such as airplanes or explosives to the risk list. Today we 

have COVID-19, which has emptied not datacenters but offices as entire economies have struggled to 

suddenly work remotely. Along the way, insider-triggered logical disasters – whether deliberately through 

an angry employee or an “oops” admin mistake – were also added to the list. 

In the last couple of years, however, one cyber threat has eclipsed all the others: denial of availability 

(DoA) malware, including wiperware and ransomware. If you don’t update your business continuity / 

disaster recovery (BC/DR) strategy to be “cyber first” to account for this threat, you’re needlessly exposing 

your organization to potentially catastrophic risk. 



Let’s look at how the ransomware threat, enterprise vulnerability to this threat, and the threat’s impact 

combine to move it to the top of your BC/DR risk matrix. Finally, we’ll recommend action you must take 

to minimize ransomware’s impact to your organization. 

The shape of historic disaster recovery plans 

Most historic disaster threats share one characteristic: they can be mitigated with physical or logical 

distribution or redundancy. East coast data center threatened with a hurricane? Ensure you have a 

redundant data center in the central US. Worried about power loss? Install a backup UPS for fault 

tolerance. 

Insider logical disasters can be more difficult to recover from than physical disasters, as corruption can 

spread via the same mechanisms that provide your systems their fault tolerance. But the history of such 

incidents has shown that these occurrences are relatively rare, companies have mitigating controls in 

place, and the incident’s damage is usually limited. 

The DoA threat 

In contrast, the threat of cyber disaster has come to dominate all other threats due to its frequency and 

massive impact. Wipers like NotPetya, Shamoon, Destover and ransomware such as Petya, WannaCry, 

and LockerGoga have crippled organizations large and small around the world, encrypting some or all of 

their IT infrastructure within minutes or hours of a single computer’s infection and sending them back to 

manual operations until (or if) they can recover their systems. 

Originating as broadly distributed campaigns, ransomware attacks have evolved into highly targeted and 

extremely damaging network-wide infections i . Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that ransomware 

damages will cost the world $20 billion by 2021 ii . In addition to large enterprises, state and local 

governments have also become targets: 53 were reported in 2018, and at least 70 in 2019 including 

Baltimore and Atlanta iii . 

The enterprise vulnerability 

Organizations of all sizes are highly vulnerable to ransomware attacks. Phishing, especially targeted 

(spear) phishing, remains an extremely effective infection vector because it plays on human nature. 

Microsoft has stated iv that phishing maintains an approximately 15% success rate regardless of education 

programs – even among its own employees. 

There’s also critical vulnerability well understood by IT professionals that has less awareness up the 

management chain. Microsoft’s Active Directory - the distributed security system that controls user 

authentication and systems authorization in well over 90% of the world’s medium and large organizations 

– is devilishly hard to restore. Because of this, only a small percentage of companies have a 

comprehensive, regularly tested AD recovery plan. (Look your AD admin in the eye and ask.) 

Why, after a product lifetime of almost 20 years, do IT departments not have the same level of recovery 

plan for AD as they would for a critical file server? Mainly because AD is very robust to both physical 

domain controller failures and logical failures. But it was designed in the late 90’s when no one could 

conceive of malware that encrypts every single domain controller within minutes. 



Under the very best circumstances, it takes days to restore AD in medium to large organizations. All 

applications that depend upon AD – most of the enterprise, from file servers to physical security systems 

- cannot be returned to availability until it’s restored. And a ransomware attack that has encrypted most 

of your network is not the best of circumstances. 

The devastating impact 

Unlike a natural disaster, every computer system within network reach of a malware attack is at risk 

regardless of its location in the world. But for one African server, Maersk’s AD would have been entirely 

destroyed by NotPetya. That server just happened to be offline due to power failure. Its hard drives were 

hand-flown from Ghana to IT headquarters in England to begin the AD recovery process, which ultimately 

took nine days. And most applications couldn’t be restored until AD was restored. NotPetya is 

conservatively estimated to have cost the company $300M and its suppliers much more. In total, 

NotPetya was estimated to have caused $10 billion damage to organizations worldwide. 

A month after they were hit with LockerGoga, 100-year-old Norsk Hydro was still operating most of its 

160 manufacturing facilities manually using pre-printed order lists. When all of the computers of Houston 

County, Alabama were encrypted, the high school principal said, “People are going to learn what it was 

like 50 years ago, 30 years ago.” 

Updated Risk Matrix 

Given this new reality, BC/DR professionals must adopt a cyber first mindset for their inherent risk 

analysis: 

Cyber First BC/DR Risk Matrix 



This updated matrix considers the threat frequency, enterprise vulnerability, and impact of ransomware 

and other malware. 

Remediating the ransomware risk 

How do you lower the risk associated with a ransomware attack? Historically, prevention and detection 

have been the main defenses against malware, but for ransomware we’ve already shown these 

approaches are only moderately effective. Recreating lost data is usually impossible or impractical. Some 

victims have paid to recover their data, but this is a chancy (and morally ambiguous) approach. Further, 

data encrypted by worms like NotPetya are unrecoverable. 

This leaves recovery as a keystone strategy to minimize the impact of ransomware to your organization. 

An automated, tested recovery plan for all your critical systems is the best way to minimize the damage 

inflicted by a ransomware attack. Infrastructure such as Active Directory, DNS, and DHCP must be your 

top priority because they are foundational to recovering everything else on your network. 

Ransomware attacks are the leading cause of organizational IT disruption today. Business continuity and 

disaster recovery planning need to take this new reality into account and update their risk analysis 

accordingly. Recovery has traditionally taken a back seat to prevention and detection for malware 

protection, but today rapid, automated restoration of your systems and data may be the only shield your 

organization has against corporate Armageddon. 

i 

Multiple sources – Microsoft SIR, Verizon, etc. 

ii https://cybersecurityventures.com/global-ransomware-damage-costs-predicted-to-reach-20-billion-usdby-2021/ 

iii 

https://www.recordedfuture.com/state-local-government-ransomware-attacks/ 

iv 

"Shut the door to cybercrime…" Ignite 2017, BRK3016, 35:45 


Mickey Bresman, CEO, Semperis 

Mickey is a co-founder of Semperis and leads the company’s 

overall strategic vision and implementation. A long-time 

enterprise software expert, Mickey began his technical career in 

the Navy computing technical unit over a decade ago. Prior to 

co-founding Semperis, Mickey was the CTO of a Microsoft gold 

partner integration company, YouCC Technologies, successfully 

growing the company’s overall performance year over year. 

Mickey holds a BA in Technical Management and a Minor in 

Electronic Engineering. 

Mickey can be reached on Twitter at @ber_mic and at our 

company website http://www.semperis.com/ 



Getting Employees Back to the New Normal 

Work will never be quite the same once the pandemic has passed 

By Brendan O’Connor, CEO and Co-founder, AppOmni 

There are encouraging signs that the Covid-19 pandemic – arguably the greatest disaster of our 

generation – is beginning to recede, at least in some parts of the world. While the disarray it provoked 

throughout the economy is still very much with us, there is reason to believe that a tolerable new normal 

will emerge – an innovative set of practices representing a tectonic shift away from what normal used to 

be – in the workplace, in leisure pursuits, and in commerce. 

Although the contours of that new normal are still in flux, the experience of the past few months has 

driven home some durable lessons – lessons we expect will help shape post-pandemic life as recovery 

gets underway. One of the most apparent is that working from home is almost certain to become an 

enduring element of employment for millions of workers. That’s good, both for the workers and their 

employers. But it comes with certain caveats. 

For starters, I’ve heard from leaders of several organizations that employees working from home have 

been asking their companies to slow down the release of new and updated versions of their enterprise 

software. Learning new software and mastering feature changes, particularly without hands-on personal 



guidance, is disruptive, often leading to a surge of help desk calls that can be hard for IT staff, working 

remotely, to keep up with. 

The practical consequences of slowing the rollouts might include accepting longer lives for software 

versions that would previously have been considered obsolete. It would also argue for greater use of 

automated instructional software layered atop the enterprise application – software that enables 

employees to master changes more quickly and with greater confidence. 

Another result of the coronavirus outbreak has been an acceleration of information movement from onsite 

data centers into the cloud – a transition that had already been underway. Cloud-based applications 

and related data can be readily accessed by people working remotely using just about any kind of digital 

device, which makes it attractive for homebound workers. And today, public clouds are widely regarded 

as secure. It is in cloud providers’ best interest to ensure the highest security of the application and data 

to attract more adopters. Increasing adoption of public cloud and transition away from traditional 

datacenter solutions will be additional added changes in the digital landscape. 

Then there’s the Big One: security. Data security has always been a focus of IT professionals and 

frequently a concern to senior management as well. But the explosion of off-site computing resulting 

from employees working at home, frequently using their own consumer-level digital devices, has made 

security an imperative. Of course, there was serious concern from the onset of Covid-19 that large-scale 

work-from-home patterns would present a temptation to hackers. Less effective security in home 

environments – including network sharing with children and other family members – would make it much 

easier for criminals to perpetrate fraud or attack unsuspecting users. 

As it turns out, those suspicions were right. According to the Wall Street Journal, cyberattacks against 

banks and other financial firms rose by 238 percent between February and April 1 , just as the bulk of their 

employees began working remotely. At the same time, aggressive furloughing for cost reduction led to 

a decrease in the number of employees whose regular assignments involved responding to cyberattacks. 

The problem has been amplified by the government’s mass distribution of stimulus funds for individuals 

and businesses through financial institutions, which play a central role in the pandemic response. 

Capitalizing on chaos is a familiar pattern for every sort of criminality, and the confusion resulting from 

the coronavirus response provided a perfect recipe for abuse. 

What does that mean going forward into a post-pandemic world? There are, as a report pointed out, 

various technical steps that would be prudent to take including multi-factor authentication, special controls 

for certain facility-based applications, and device virtualization. But the primary focus needs to be on 

people – the system’s users. 

An indefinitely and perhaps permanently distributed workforce needs to stay aware of how the things 

they do can either create or abate risks. That means constantly communicating the basics of digital 

hygiene, possibly engaging a service that focuses on raising user awareness of cyber mischief, along 

with vigilant monitoring for telltale signs of a security breach. Among the best practices for users: 

● Keep business and personal email and other work accounts separate. 

● Require the use of multi-factor authentication and ensure such policies are continuously enforced. 

● Make sure users know what to do if a device is lost, stolen or compromised. 

● Keep processes as simple as possible; when they get complicated, they get ignored. 



● Equip IT and security teams with tools for continuous monitoring across multiple SaaS 

environments. 

Of course, there are likely to be other features about the emerging ‘new normal’ that touch in one way or 

another on the digital lives of organizations, their employees, and the people they serve. For example, 

one commentator in Forbes argued that adopting and then complying with a new international 

cybersecurity regulatory framework – a regimen similar to GDPR or HIPPA – would be timely. Whether 

the political and economic support for such a regimen will materialize in the U.S. is an open question. 

But with or without one, the pandemic has given the need to create a secure and resilient digital 

ecosphere of technology, processes, and people, greater urgency than ever before. 


Brendan O’Connor – CEO and Co-founder 

Brendan is a 20 year veteran of the security industry. Prior 

to founding AppOmni, he was Security CTO at ServiceNow. 

Before joining ServiceNow, Brendan spent 10 years at 

Salesforce where he led Salesforce’s global information 

security organization as CSO. Prior to his role as CSO, 

Brendan was VP Product Security at Salesforce. Brendan 

has also worked in the Financial Services and 

Communications sectors. His past experience includes 

work as a vulnerability researcher, security engineer, and 

privacy advocate. He is passionate about securing the technology that connects the world. 

Brendan can be reached on Twitter at @AppOmniSecurity and at our company website 

https://appomni.com/. 



Security in The New Normal Requires an Agile Approach 

By Danny Presten, Chief Methodologist at Digital.ai 

Phishing attacks are up 600%, ransomware attacks have increased 148%, and the FBI has reported a 

300% increase in cybercrimes. Cyber criminals are stepping up their game during the COVID-19 

pandemic and, to ensure safety and security, businesses must do the same. 

To keep pace with the ever-increasing threat level and achieve results in the new normal of remote-based 

working, many organisations are taking an Agile approach. Once thought of as the domain of DevOps, 

Agile is making its way into DevSecOps, cybersecurity and beyond, and for good reason. 

Agile is an iterative way of working that encourages rapidly releasing smaller slices of value as opposed 

to the long lead in times of larger, traditional projects. In this way, results can be continuously improved 

as quickly as circumstances change to meet ever evolving business needs. Many companies have 

benefited from an Agile approach to delivering software and now organisations are expanding those ways 

of working to include more and more security teams. 

Agile offers huge benefits in cybersecurity where security teams are faced with threats that are continually 

evolving, and bad actors who will look to adjust their methods almost instantaneously to find the best 

attack vector. 



The 14 th Annual State of Agile Report explores this uptake and the reasons for it, along with wider issues 

concerning Agile. 

The importance of Agile 

The 14 th Annual State of Agile report, based on a survey of more than 1,000 global IT and business 

professionals, highlights how Agile adoption improves key capabilities needed to respond to current 

business challenges. Around six in ten respondents said Agile has both helped increase speed to market 

and improved team productivity. 

A follow up survey conducted in mid-May 2020 to learn more about how the COVID-19 pandemic has 

affected Agile adoption revealed that 55 percent of respondents said their company plans to increase the 

use of Agile in the next 12-24 months. This is a rise of 13 percent over the original survey completed just 

five months previously. Additionally, 43 percent of organisations said their momentum for Agile adoption 

has increased over the past 90 days, with 15 percent saying the increase is significant. 

The main catalyst for organisations to adopt Agile comes from wanting to accelerate delivery of value to 

customers as well as being able to quickly respond to changing circumstances. Indeed, our survey found 

that the second largest reason for adopting Agile is to enhance the ability to manage changing priorities, 

with two-thirds (63 percent) of respondents citing this as a key motivator. 

This key advantage has led to Agile being adopted in many areas of the business. Software development 

and IT are understandably the most popular at 37 percent and 26 percent. However, increasingly it is 

being utilised in operations, marketing, HR and sales. Cybersecurity is no exception as Agile can help 

security teams combat continually evolving threats. 

The diffusion of Agile principles 

The concept of Agile has been around for many years now. It began in the late 2000s with the Scrum 

framework, which focuses on teamwork, accountability and iterative releases for the development of 

hardware and software. This was expanded throughout the early 2000s through a variety of scaling 

frameworks allowing multiple small teams to collaborate effectively on various parts of the product. Today 

teams collaborate in a variety of ways beyond the traditional face to face interactions with 71 percent of 

companies reporting teams collaborating across multiple geographies. 

As companies began to benefit from increased development productivity, they realised their next 

bottleneck was actually getting the new product to production. This led to the rise in prominence of 

DevOps in the middle of the 2010s ushering in an expansion in Agile practices and culture. To that end 

more than 90 percent of respondents are now placing a high value on DevOps and 75 percent of 

organisations are actively planning and/or implementing transformation in this area. Organisations going 

through their DevOps transformation look to achieve accelerated delivery speed (70 percent), improved 

quality (62 percent) and reduced risk (48 percent). In an increasingly digital world, it’s critical to get high 

quality, valuable software to consumers as rapidly as possible. It’s clear that organisations are realising 

focus in this area is critical for their survival. 

As DevOps began to address operational bottlenecks, organisations started to see issues in other areas 

and have realised they need to look at the entire end-to-end value stream. Value Stream Management 



(VSM) helps to decrease time to value by providing a systematic approach for measuring and improving 

workflow across the organisation through a combination of people, processes, and technologies. 

Currently, eight out of 10 respondents said they have an interest in, are planning to implement, or are 

implementing VSM. Having an end-to-end view of how value flows in an organisation will enable firms to 

tie actual outcomes to deliveries enabling a much-improved view of value planned and delivered. 

The rise of VSM has led to the incorporation of security into the DevOps process, rather than as an 

afterthought, to create DevSecOps. This approach enables organisations to address security issues 

during development, reducing cycle time and rework while improving quality and streamlining the 

workflow. Additionally, this also means the security team now has a seat at the DevOps table and can 

make sure that the appropriate security is in place as an app is being built, reducing vulnerabilities. 

Challenges implementing Agile 

With all the advantages an Agile framework offers, why aren’t more businesses fully adopting it? 

Organisational obstacles can often be considerable. More than 40 percent of respondents report an 

overall organisational resistance to change, not enough leadership participation, inconsistent practices 

across teams and an organisational culture that is at odds with Agile values. Even more challenging to 

note is that these have been top barriers for Agile adoption consistently for more than five years. 

It’s critical that leadership understands the principles that make an Agile ecosystem work and take effort 

to bring about the necessary organisation change to harness their benefit. 

Making Agile a success relies on implementing proven practices and principles that are executed through 

a culture immersed in this way of working. Increasingly we’re seeing management learn and own those 

core Agile values. While it’s obvious there is more work to do it’s encouraging to see movement as an 

organisation’s success depends on it. 

Coping with increasingly sophisticated bad actors while simultaneously working through the new realities 

brought on by the pandemic require an organisation that can pivot at a moment’s notice. Those 

organisations leveraging an Agile approach are better able to respond to changing conditions, maintain 

quality and security, and provide solutions that bring value to their customers. 




Danny is Chief Methodologist at Digital.ai. He has several 

transformation tours of duty behind him in which he's 

worked in agile organisations, consulted with senior leaders 

and led training initiatives. He is an entrepreneurial selfstarter 

with over 20 years’ experience successfully 

addressing complex delivery challenges in a variety of 

industries including web development, e-commerce, 

healthcare, nonprofit, supply chain, and legal. 

Danny can be reached online at can be reached online at 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/danny-presten-3b5b413/ and at our company website https://digital.ai/ 



Why Are Fully Staffed Cybersecurity Teams Unable to 

Keep Up with Hacks? 

By Steve Salinas, Head of Product Marketing, Deep Instinct 

Faced with mounting cyber threats, large enterprises are devoting more resources than ever to improving 

their cybersecurity posture. According to a Cisco survey released last fall, 93% of enterprises with 10,000 

or more employees spend more than $250,000 annually on cybersecurity, with half spending over $1 

million each year. 

The return on those investments leaves much to be desired. A 2019 report from Accenture and the 

Ponemon Institute found that security breaches had increased 11% since 2018 and had spiked 67% 

since 2014. Some experts ascribe the problem to woefully understaffed cybersecurity teams – but even 

fully staffed, highly experienced cyber teams are encountering hacks they can’t fully prevent or contain. 

The real culprit isn’t necessarily the size of the typical organization’s cybersecurity staff, but the outdated 

tools and operational methodologies many of these teams use. As hacks grow more frequent and more 

complex, organizations should rethink the tools and technologies they’re using to meet the threat. 



The Rising Cost of Failure 

How much is cybersecurity costing companies? In a recent Ponemon-Deep Instinct survey of IT and IT 

security practitioners, only 40% of respondents believed their budgets were sufficient for achieving a 

robust cybersecurity posture. 

These budgets are predominantly funneled into containing and remediating threats rather than preventing 

them – in large part because cyber staff are overwhelmed with the amount of data that they need to 

monitor. Yet this “assume a breach and then contain” approach comes at a big cost, with the time and 

money spend remediating attacks costing well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The value of 

preventing a cyber-attack ranges from $400,000 to $1.4 million, depending on the nature of the attack. If 

an attack is the first of its kind, it’s virtually guaranteed to succeed with absent strong preventative 

capabilities, and organizations stand to lose upwards of $1 million per successful attack. 

Subpar Solutions, Subpar Results 

Why are current approaches to cybersecurity proving so inadequate? Because they over-rely on the 

human intervention. 

Specifically, most AI-based cybersecurity solutions are powered by traditional machine learning (ML), 

which is inhibited by a number of limitations that have become substantial problems in the recent past. 

Chief among these limitations is data: ML models are trained on only a fraction of the available raw data, 

and are trained on features identified by experts. 

Human error, of course, also comes into play, even when highly specialized computer scientists with 

expertise in cybersecurity carry out ML feature engineering. These professionals excel at training ML 

models on known threats – but even seasoned cybersecurity professionals are unable to anticipate 

emerging, first-seen attacks, that are designed to be evasive. Hackers of course, understand this, which 

is why they now building malware that is capable of fooling ML models into classifying it as benign. 

Finally, there’s a limit to the size of the dataset for training ML systems before reaching learning curve 

saturation – the point past which the system no longer improves its accuracy. 

Given these limitations, ML systems struggle to detect new, previously unseen malware, while generating 

high rates of false positives. Just as the cost of an unprevented attack can deliver a real blow to the 

bottom line, the time and resources required to investigate false positives also strains security teams’ 

resources. This, in turn, breeds a sense of “alert fatigue,” making teams more prone to error when 

genuine threats emerge. 

Simply put, AI trade-offs – not understaffed cybersecurity teams – may be one of the biggest inhibitors to 

achieving a resilient cybersecurity posture. 



AI-Powered Hackers and the Increased Pace of Attacks 

Compounding the challenges posed by flawed cybersecurity solutions, hackers are increasingly 

leveraging automation to diversify their attacks and execute them at an accelerated pace. The AV-Test 

Institute found that over 350,000 new malware are generated every day and networks regularly 

experience thousands of security events daily– making it all the more difficult for human security 

professionals to sift through all potential threats. Even the largest, most skilled cybersecurity teams can’t 

be expected to handle this load. And when cybersecurity teams successfully detect a threat, they often 

run out of time to respond before hackers have already caused substantial damage. 

Take the 2019 Equifax data breach. In the wake of the breach, Equifax’s security team worked 36-hour 

shifts, which the company’s CISO acknowledged had come at a great cost to the team’s mental health. 

On average, it takes 191 days – half a year – to identify an attack. Without the luxury of months to spare, 

how should organizations adjust their cybersecurity approach? 

A Cyber Paradigm Shift 

In the short term, adding more cyber professionals to IT teams can help – but even a large and 

experienced team won’t be able to compensate for subpar security tools. 

Because today’s hackers are operating autonomously, cyber solutions need to do so, as well. Such 

solutions require minimal staff intervention, enabling teams to triage potential security events and prevent 

time wasted on false positives. Deep learning-based autonomous solutions also offer powerful 

capabilities for detecting and preventing attacks before they are executed – potentially helping 

organizations save millions. 

It’s little wonder, then, that two-thirds of IT and IT security leaders believe that using automation and 

advanced AI like deep learning, will improve their ability to prevent attacks and that they plan to implement 

these solutions within the next two years. 

While beefing up staffing isn’t a panacea, implementing autonomous solutions isn’t about putting cyber 

professionals out of work. Instead, it’s about putting their essential skillset towards more efficient and 

strategic use while simultaneously tightening and improving existing cybersecurity measures. 

The dizzying pace at which today’s cyber threats are evolving underscores the need for a cyber paradigm 

shift that emphasizes autonomous protection and attack prevention. Humans alone can’t combat the 

hyper-efficient machines hackers are employing. Only when malicious actors’ sophisticated technology 

is met by even more sophisticated technology, will organizations achieve resilient protection. 




Steve Salinas is the Head of Product Marketing at Deep Instinct. 

Steve Salinas is Head of Product Marketing for Deep Instinct, a leading 

provider of deep learning-based cybersecurity solutions. His 

experience includes holding product management, product 

marketing, and solution engineering positions with leading security 

vendors, including Guidance Software (now OpenText), Alert 

Logic, Siemplify, and Cylance. He is a frequent presenter at 

industry conferences, podcasts, and regularly publishes blogs 

aimed at providing both business and technical insights to the 

security community. Steve went to Texas A&M University for 

undergrad and earned an MBA from Pepperdine University. Steve 

lives in Huntington Beach, California. Steve can be reached online at @so_cal_aggie and at the company 

website https://www.deepinstinct.com/. 



Looks Like Russian Hackers Are on An Email Scam Spree 

By Tim Sadler, CEO, Tessian 

In 2019, businesses lost a staggering $1.8bn because of Business Email Compromise (BEC). These 

types of attacks, whereby a trusted relationship is compromised through email impersonation or email 

account hacking, are becoming more common and also more successful. The reason? First, they are 

easier and cost-effective to carry out, making such attack methods attractive and lucrative for 

cybercriminals. Second, to improve the success rate of their scams, hackers are making it much more 

difficult for their victims to detect that they are being targeted. 

In fact, just recently, researchers identified a cybercriminal gang called Cosmic Lynx that has carried out 

more than 200 BEC campaigns since July last year, in attempts to steal as much as $2.7m from Fortune 

500 or Global 2000 companies. Believed to be the first reported case of a BEC gang operating from 

Russia, the group delivers sophisticated and creative email campaigns that target senior executives, 

tailoring their messages to discuss legitimate mergers and acquisitions. 

Why Cosmic Lynx is cause for concern 

BEC scams are not, traditionally, this group’s method of attack. However, as BEC offers a lucrative 

opportunity to steal millions of dollars in just a few emails, it appears that this Russian cyber gang is 

changing its tact. 



One of the defining characteristics of Cosmic Lynx’s campaigns is that they are far more sophisticated 

than generic phishing scams. This is a well-researched operation, run by experienced hackers who have 

clearly done their homework. The hackers investigated companies that were completing an acquisition, 

identified a senior executive target, and impersonated the CEO of the target company in order to deceive 

their victim into wiring money to a fraudulent account. 

To add another layer of perceived legitimacy, the hackers also impersonated an external lawyer at a wellregarded 

law firm to “facilitate the payment”, making it very difficult for the target to think that they are 

being scammed. Finally, the hackers ensured a high level of quality and diligence in their campaigns, 

paying particular attention to brands’ details, and making sure grammar and spelling were without error. 

Social engineering campaigns like this can be devastating to businesses, and anyone in an organisation 

can fall for the scams. As hackers up their game, businesses need to ensure all employees are aware of 

the threats in their inboxes and consider whether they have the security measures in place to detect the 

deception before it's too late. 

My company has DMARC so I should be protected against email impersonation, right? 

Implementing Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) is a 

necessary first step for businesses to prevent hackers spoofing your company’s domain in its email 

attacks. Without it, an attacker can directly impersonate your company’s domain and users will think they 

are receiving an email from a legitimate (and trusted) source. 

In the particular case of Cosmic Lynx, researchers found that the group has a strong understanding of 

DMARC and analyses the public DMARC records to select its targets and methods of attack. The problem 

is that, as DMARC records are publicly available, it's very easy for hackers to identify companies that do 

not have email authentication protocols in place, allowing them to directly impersonate a company's 

domain and pose as the CEO. 

But even if your company does have a DMARC policy in place, attackers can also assess how strictly 

you've configured it. If your company has a strict email policy in place, the attacker can still carry out an 

advanced spear phishing attack by registering a look-a-like domain, banking on the fact that a busy 

employee may miss the slight deviation from the original domain. This highlights why companies cannot 

rely on the email authentication protocol as a silver bullet to prevent email impersonation scams. 

The other problem is that while your organisation might have DMARC in place, your external contacts 

may not. This means that while your organisation's domain is protected against direct impersonation, 

your employees may be vulnerable to impersonation of external contacts like partners, customers or 

lawyers. Again, this knowledge has worked to Cosmic Lynx's advantage; they impersonated external 

lawyers from real UK law firms to add another layer of legitimacy to their scams. 



How do I protect my company from BEC? 

Of course, security teams put rules and policies in place to stop malicious messages landing in inboxes 

but, as we’ve seen, hackers find ways around these rules. Another solution is to train employees on the 

threats. And security training helps to raise awareness, but solely relying on training means relying on 

your employees to spot every scam and every threat. This is unrealistic; businesses cannot expect busy 

and stressed employees to get it right 100% of the time, especially when hackers make their deceptions 

so difficult to detect. 

To prevent BEC attacks, you need to detect the impersonation but it’s a difficult problem to solve. To 

accurately detect it, you need to understand what is being impersonated. You need to be able to answer 

the question, “for this user, at this point in time, given this context, is the sender really who they say they 

are?”. 

Machine learning can help, though. By using machine learning algorithms to analyse historical email 

communications and understand each and every employees’ relationships over email, you can start to 

build a picture of normal (and abnormal) behaviour. When an employee receives an email that looks out 

of the ordinary, they can be alerted in real-time to the threat and given advice on what to do next. 

The example of Cosmic Lynx has shown that more and more cyber-criminal gangs are turning to BEC to 

achieve their objective of scamming businesses out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Companies 

need an advanced, multi-layered solution to this increasingly sophisticated problem. By using machine 

learning to protect people on email, and by solving the problem at the human layer, businesses can start 

to tackle the rising threat of BEC. 


Tim Sadler, CEO, Tessian 

Tessian is building the world’s first Human Layer 

Security platform to automatically secure all humandigital 

interactions within the enterprise. Today, our 

products use stateful machine learning to protect 

people using email and to prevent threats like spear 

phishing, accidental data loss due to misdirected emails, data exfiltration and other non-compliant email 

activity. We’ve raised $60m from legendary security investors like Sequoia and Accel and have over 150 

employees located in New York and London. 

https://www.tessian.com/ 



TLS/ SSL Decryption – One of the Main Pillars of Zero 

Trust Model 

By Adil Baghir, Technology Consultant Lead, Middle East & Africa at A10 Networks 

In a world where everything and everyone is connected to the internet, in one way or another, it’s hard to 

imagine a network that is truly secure. Data, large amounts of it, are at the centre of it all. With industries 

from healthcare to the education sector to the government using the internet to provide easy access to 

data, it is no wonder that cybersecurity teams are always working around the clock to try and come up 

with better ways of defending these networks and the data they store. 

Insider Threats – Need for Security to Evolve from “Castle and Moat” Approach 

Modern cyberattacks are not limited to just network intrusion from the outside. Internal threat actors can 

often be found at the centre of sophisticated attacks. 

Initially, we had the concept of zones, perimeters and network segments – placing all the protected assets 

“inside” the secured network perimeter. However, attackers are always evolving the methods they use; 

always on the lookout for weak points in your network defences; and coming up with newer ways of 

infiltrating the perimeter. Keeping up with them is a challenging and ongoing struggle. We also need to 

realize that the “castle and moat” approach to our network defences was mostly effective against threats 

that resided outside the network. But what about the threats on the inside? What about modern attacks 

that work on multiple levels to try to bring your networks down? How do we protect our networks from 

people who have legitimate access to all its resources? How do we battle the ever-growing and everevolving 

modern cyberattacks? Add to these questions, regulations like GDPR, and the rising fines, and 

you will see that having your networks attacked and data breached is one of the worst things that can 

happen to your company. With these issues as the backdrop, we are forced to re-assess and re-think the 

way we defend our networks, users and data. 



Zero Trust Model – a Modern Cybersecurity Approach 

Zero Trust attempts to fix the problems, and patch the holes, in our cybersecurity strategies. At the core 

of it, the Zero Trust model is based on the principal of “trust nobody.” The Zero Trust model dictates that 

no one in your network should be trusted completely, that access should be restricted as much as 

possible, and that trust should be seen as yet another vulnerability that can put your network at risk. 

Some of the precepts of the Zero Trust model are: 

• Networks need to be redesigned in a way that east-west traffic and access can be restricted. 

• Incident detection and response should be facilitated and improved using comprehensive 

analytics and automation solutions, as well as centralized management and visibility into the 

network, data, workloads, users and devices used. 

• Access should be restricted as much as possible, limiting excessive privileges for all users. 

• In multi-vendor networks, all solutions should integrate and work together seamlessly, enabling 

compliance and unified security. The solutions should also be easy to use so that additional 

complexity can be removed. 

Danger of Security Blind Spots 

In recent times, we have witnessed a phenomenal rise in the use of encryption across the internet. Google 

reports that over 90 percent of the traffic passing through its services is encrypted. The same is true for 

all the other vendors. This rise has been driven by many factors, including privacy concerns. 

However, with encryption comes the creation of a “blind spot” in our network defences as most of the 

security devices we use are not designed to decrypt and inspect traffic. The Zero Trust model is not 

immune to this problem as visibility is considered as one of the key elements to its successful 

implementation. Without complete encrypted traffic visibility, the model will fail, introducing vulnerabilities 

that can be exploited by both insiders and hackers. 

TLS/SSL Decryption – One of the Main Pillars of Zero Trust 

A centralized and dedicated decryption solution must be placed at the centre of the Zero Trust model and 

should be included as one of the essential components your security strategy. 

Many security vendors will make claims of the ability to decrypt their own traffic, working independently 

of a centralized decryption solution. However, this “distributed decryption” approach can introduce 

problems of its own, including inferior performance and network bottlenecks, and fixing these would 

require costly upgrades. In a multi-vendor, multidevice security infrastructure, the distributed decryption 

also forces you to deploy your private keys in multiple locations, creating an unnecessarily large threat 

surface in your network, which could be subject to exploitation. 



Key features of a good TLS/ SSL Decryption Solution 

It is important that a dedicated, centralized decryption solution provides full visibility to the enterprise 

security infrastructure for TLS/SSL traffic. Not only that, but the solution also needs to provide a multilayered 

security approach, which then makes it the perfect candidate to be deployed at the centre of a 

Zero Trust network. 

Below are some of the features to look out for when looking to implement a TLS/ SSL Decryption Solution: 

• Full Traffic Visibility – It needs to enable the entire security infrastructure to inspect all traffic in 

clear-text, at fast speeds, ensuring that no encrypted attacks or data breaches can slip through 

• Ease of Integration – It should be vendor agnostic and easily integrate with security devices 

already deployed within the network. This drives down additional costs and upgrades. 

• Multi-Layered Security Services – These are additional security services, including URL 

filtering, application visibility and control, threat intelligence and threat investigation, that help 

strengthen the security efficacy of the entire enterprise network 

• User Access Control – The product should be able to enforce authentication and authorization 

policies to restrict unneeded access, log access information and provide the ability to apply 

different security policies based on user and group IDs. 

• Micro Segmentation – It should facilitate micro-segmentation through its ability to provide 

granular traffic control, user and group ID-based traffic control, and support for multi-tenancy 

• Securing Cloud Access – SaaS security is an important feature which can be provided by 

enforcing tenant access control and visibility into user activities. 

In conclusion, without a centralized and dedicated TLS/SSL decryption solution, the Zero Trust model is 

unable to do what it was designed to do – protect our networks, users and data from threats residing 

inside and outside the network. 


Adil Baghir is Technology Consultant Lead for Middle East & 

Africa at A10 Networks. He is a security and networking 

specialist having worked for tech powerhouses like STC, 

Mobily and Applied Technologies Company. 

Adil can be reached online at (abaghir@a10networks.com) 

and at our company website https://www.a10networks.com/ 



Build Your AI Incident Response Plan… Before It’s Too 

Late 

By Patrick Hall* and Andrew Burt** 

* Patrick Hall is principal scientist at bnh.ai, a boutique law firm focused on AI and analytics, and an 

adjunct professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at GWU. 

** Andrew Burt is managing partner at bnh.ai and chief legal officer at Immuta. 

Artificial intelligence can fail. It can also be attacked. When a failure or attack spins out of control, this is 

a major AI incident. There have been over 1,000 public reports of AI incidents in recent years. Yet many 

organizations are operating nascent AI efforts without incident response plans - using AI, in other words, 

without any clear understanding of what to do when it fails. 

Why? Organizations simply aren’t thinking about AI failures, they’re focused on AI successes instead. 

Indeed, there’s a great deal of hype on the positive side of this technology, and deservedly so. It can 

make and save money, and it can even be transformational. However, AI is probably more likely to fail 

than traditional enterprise software, at least as of today. It’s for this reason that some have called the 

technology the “high-interest credit card of technical debt.” Governments around the world are 



increasingly interested in enforcing best practices for AI. And numerous damaging attacks against AI 

systems have already been published in machine learning and security research journals. 

Our bet is you’ll be hearing more about AI incidents in the coming years. Below, we’ll go over why AI is 

(and is not) different from more traditional software systems, some of the primary lessons we’ve learned 

writing AI incident response plans, and we’ll introduce the free and open bnh.ai Sample AI Incident 

Response Plan to help you make your organization better prepared for AI incidents. 

How AI Is (and Is Not) Different 

What’s so different about AI? Basically, it’s much more complex than traditional software, it has a nasty 

tendency to drift toward failure, and it’s often based on statistical modeling. What does that really mean? 

More complexity: For starters, AI systems can have millions or billions of rules or parameters that 

consider combinations of thousands of inputs to make a decision. That’s a lot to debug and it’s hard to 

tell if an AI system has been manipulated by an adversary. 

Drift toward failure: Most AI systems are trained on static snapshots of the world encapsulated in 

training datasets. And just in case you haven’t noticed, the world is not a particularly static place. As the 

world changes, the AI system’s understanding of reality becomes less and less valid, leading to degrading 

quality of decisions or predictions over time. This is known as “model decay” or “concept drift,” and it 

applies to nearly all current AI systems. 

Probabilistic outcomes: Most AI systems today are inherently probabilistic, which means that their 

decisions and predictions are guaranteed to be wrong at least some of the time. In standard software, 

wrong outcomes are bugs. In AI, they are features. This makes testing and establishing tolerances for 

failure more difficult. 

The combination of these three characteristics present a number of testing difficulties, potential attack 

surfaces and failure modes for AI-based systems that often are not present in more traditional software 

applications. 

If that’s what’s different, then what’s the same? 

In the end, AI is still just software. It’s not magically exempt from the bugs and attacks that plague other 

software, and it should be documented, tested, managed, and monitored just like any other valuable 

enterprise software asset. This means that AI incident response plans, and AI security plans more 

generally, needn’t reinvent the wheel. Frequently they can piggyback on existing plans and processes. 



What We Learned About AI Incident Response 

Drafting AI incident response plans has been eye-opening, even for us. In putting to paper for our 

customers all the various ways AI can fail and its many attack surfaces, we’ve learned several big 

lessons. 

Neither MRM Nor Conventional lR is Enough 

The basics of our AI incident response plans come from combining model risk management (MRM) 

practices, which have become fairly mature within the financial industry, with pre-existing computer 

incident response guidance and other information security best practices. MRM helps protect against AI 

failures. Conventional incident response provides a framework to prepare for AI attacks. These are both 

great starts, but as we detail below, a simple combination of both is still not quite right for AI incident 

response. This is why our Sample AI Incident Response plan includes guidance on both MRM and 

traditional computer incident response, plus plans to handle novel AI risks in the context of the burgeoning 

AI regulation landscape in the US. 

MRM practices, illustrated in, among other places, the Federal Reserve’s Supervisory Guidance on 

Model Risk Management, known as SR 11-7, are an excellent start for decreasing risk in AI. (In fact, if 

your organization is using AI and is not familiar with the SR 11-7 guidance, stop reading this article and 

start reading the guidance.) Broadly, MRM calls for testing of AI systems, management of AI systems 

with inventories and documentation, and careful monitoring of AI systems once they are deployed. MRM 

also relies on the concept of “effective challenge” - which consists of models and processes being 

questioned and reviewed by humans in multiple lines of technology, compliance, and audit functions. 

However, MRM practices do not specifically address AI security or incident response, and they often 

require resources not available to smaller organizations. 

We’ll address incident response for smaller organizations in the next section, but from an information 

security perspective, traditional incident response guidance is helpful - though not a perfect fit. For 

instance, AI attacks can occur without traditional routes of infiltration and exfiltration. They can manifest 

as high usage of prediction APIs, insider manipulation of AI training data or models, or as specialized 

trojans buried in complex third-party AI software or artifacts. Standard incident response guidance, say 

from SANS or NIST, will get you started in preparing for AI incidents, but they also weren’t specifically 

designed for newer attacks against AI and could leave your organization with AI security blindspots. 

When Going Fast and Breaking Things Goes Wrong 

MRM practices require serious resources: lots of people, time, and technology. Standard MRM may not 

be feasible for early-stage or small organizations under commercial pressure to “go fast and break 

things.” Common sense indicates that when going fast and breaking things, and without conventional 

MRM, AI incidents are even more likely. With AI incident response, smaller organizations without the 

capability for heavy-handed supervision on the build side of AI can spend limited resources in a manner 

that allows them to stay agile while also confronting the reality of AI incidents. 



Attitude Adjustments 

There is a lot of hype surrounding AI and the profession of data science. This hype, coupled with lax 

regulatory oversight has led to a wild west of AI implementations that can favor the kitchen sink over the 

scientific method. 

A hype-driven sense of entitlement can sometimes lead to friction and resistance from front line AI 

practitioners. We’ve found that some practitioners are unwilling or unable to understand that, despite their 

best intentions, their AI systems can fail, discriminate, get hacked, or even worse. There’s not much to 

say about this except that it’s time for the commercial practice of AI to mature and accept that with 

increasing privilege comes increased responsibility. AI can, and is already starting to, causes serious 

harm. As of today, compliance, legal, security and risk functions in large organizations may have to make 

manual attitude adjustments, and insist that AI groups are subject to the same level of oversight as other 

IT groups, including incident response planning for AI attacks and failures. 

Don’t Deploy AI Without an Incident Response Plan 

The final takeaway? AI is not magic -- meaning organizations can and should govern it. If AI is the 

transformative technology it is hyped to be (and we do believe it is), then deploying AI with no incident 

response plans is a recipe for disaster. After all, we don’t fly commercial jetliners without detailed plans 

for systems failures; we don’t run nuclear reactors without emergency plans; if the activity is important to 

us, we think and plan in advance about its risks. 

And that means we also need to be prepared for AI to fail. Having an AI incident response plan in place 

can be the difference between an easily manageable deviation in AI system behavior and serious AIdriven 

harm and liabilities. 



About the Authors 

Andrew Burt is managing partner at bnh.ai, a boutique law firm focused 

on AI and analytics, and chief legal officer at Immuta. He is also a visiting 

fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project. 

Previously, Andrew was Special Advisor for Policy to the head of the FBI 

Cyber Division, where he served as lead author on the FBI’s after action 

report on the 2014 Sony data breach, in addition to serving as chief 

compliance and chief privacy officer for the division. 

A frequent speaker and writer, Andrew has published articles on law and 

technology for the New York Times, the Financial Times and Harvard 

Business Review, where he is a regular contributor. He holds a JD from 

Yale Law School. 

Patrick Hall is principal scientist at bnh.ai, a boutique law firm 

focused on AI and analytics. Patrick also serves as an advisor to 

H2O.ai and as an adjunct professor in the Department of Decision 

Sciences at The George Washington University. 

Before co-founding bnh.ai, Patrick led H2O.ai's efforts in 

responsible AI, resulting in one of the world's first widely deployed 

commercial solutions for explainable and fair machine learning. He 

also held global customer-facing roles and R&D research roles at 

SAS Institute. Patrick studied computational chemistry at the 

University of Illinois before graduating from the Institute for 

Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University. 



Why Academic Openness and A Rise in Online Classes 

Should Invoke A Renewed Focus on Security 

By Anthony Bettini, CTO, WhiteHat Security 

For decades, researchers and students from around the world have come to study and collaborate, 

research and innovate at American universities and colleges under the auspices of academic openness 

at our schools. Unfortunately, that academic openness has resulted in universities and colleges becoming 

attractive targets for nation-state hackers, cybercriminals, and reportedly, espionage operations. Part of 

the reason for this could be because these institutions possess massive amounts of valuable data, as 

well as vital information pertaining to government projects and research, personal data of students and 

professors, financial and health information and much more. 

While higher education has been gradually increasing the number of online classes, the recent global 

pandemic has accelerated the process dramatically. Now, universities and colleges have had to quickly 

procure or build additional applications to accommodate distance learning and deliver to their students 

the same quality educational experiences they would have previously had on campus and in person. The 

emergency transition to online classes for students this past spring and the uncertainty for the upcoming 

fall adds to risks for security vulnerabilities and compounds the stress for IT administrators, who are 

responsible for safeguarding staff and student privacy. 



In fact, New York City-based security analytics firm Security Scorecard ranked education last among 17 

major industries for cybersecurity preparedness. This lack of vigilance is further illustrated by the 

increasing number of cybersecurity-related incidents at higher education schools in recent years. For 

example, Harvard University, Stanford University, University of Connecticut, Oregon State University and 

many others are reported to have all experienced security breaches of varying degrees. 

Make Application Security a Priority 

One of the first and easiest steps to ensuring that security remains a priority, either on or off campus, is 

to focus on application security. 

For some time now, universities and colleges have used software applications in the classroom and 

throughout the campus experience to aid students, professors, researchers and visitors in their work. 

However, the current global health concerns have forced many schools to re-examine remote education 

tools and implement new applications, to augment distance learning capabilities amid uncertainty. This 

is especially true for schools that plan for classes to remain online-only in the fall. Under the high-pressure 

circumstances of managing expectations for professors, students and even parents, it might be easy to 

overlook proper security protocols in the technology, when preparing for a non-typical college experience. 

There are several causes of this security oversight, and not all of the responsibility falls on the universities. 

Sometimes, software vendors cut corners in the software development process, and that can result in 

vulnerabilities that are easy for hackers to exploit within applications. 

Applications Need Rigorous Testing Before Deployment 

Most higher education institutions rely on a mix of in-house and third-party applications for instruction 

including Blackboard, Canvas and others. Regardless of where or from whom the applications are 

sourced, they must be rigorously tested for vulnerabilities and exploits before they are deployed for use 

at the university. 

To know if an application has been properly tested and secured, university IT teams should thoroughly 

research the products the universities are considering for use and understand the apps as much as 

possible. If they are confident in the development process used and are assured that appropriate testing 

and scanning was completed with dynamic application security testing (DAST), static application security 

testing (SAST), and software composition analysis (SCA), that is a step in a positive direction. Any failure 

to properly test and secure applications will undoubtedly leave students, professors, administration and 

university property vulnerable to exploits and hackers. 

Security Training for Students 

Another priority to securing a university or college is educating the students and faculty about common 

practices used to launch cyberattacks on applications and campus networks. These include phishing 

attacks, human error, and techniques like formjacking. Most, if not all schools, offer an orientation for new 

students, and an orientation session just might be a perfect opportunity to highlight cybersecurity risks 

and help students to understand how to safeguard themselves and their personal data from any attempts 

by malicious actors to gain unauthorized access to campus applications. 



Of course, it is always a good idea to remind returning students of the practical security measures to 

protect themselves. To be sure all students are helping to prevent data exposure or cyberattacks, these 

reminders can be given via an informative video shown during class, or perhaps as a required gate for 

the class registration process. 

Share the Responsibility of Security 

No matter the circumstance, application security must not take a backseat when developing applications 

for use in higher education systems. Similar to the concerns for K-12, higher education institutions must 

share the responsibility for security in the applications they use. This means investing time and resources 

into ensuring that the tools, software programs and applications are safe and secure, and free of known 

vulnerabilities and exploits. 


Anthony Bettini is the CTO for WhiteHat Security, the leader in 

application security, enabling businesses to protect critical data, 

ensure compliance, and manage risk. Previously, Anthony ran Tenable 

Research where he joined via Tenable’s acquisition of FlawCheck – a 

leading container security startup where he served as the CEO & 

founder. Before its acquisition by Symantec, Anthony was CEO & 

founder of Appthority, a leading mobile security startup and winner of 

the “Most Innovative Company of the Year” award at the RSA 

Conference. 



Is API Usage Putting Your Organization Out of 

Compliance? 

By Matt Keil, Director of Product Marketing, Cequence Security 

APIs (“Application Programming Interfaces”) are increasingly being used as the conduit for data 

exchange between applications, infrastructure, and IoT devices. The recent explosion in cloud usage and 

the urgency around digital transformation and creation of mobile apps has caused a steep increase in 

the dependence of APIs as a way to speed and simplify development efforts. Today, most organizations 

expose multiple APIs to customers and partners, published from different product teams, different 

application stacks, and following various DevOps and security procedures, oftentimes, without consistent 

security or compliance oversight. According to Gartner, by 2021, 90% of web-enabled applications will 

have more surface area for attack in the form of exposed APIs rather than the UI, up from 40% in 2019. 

When secured, APIs are a smart way to interconnect endpoints and systems to transmit data and deliver 

critical features and functionality. But, when published outside of your normal process (if you have one), 

and left unprotected or misconfigured, they give hackers easy access to large volumes of data, and make 

it easier to commit fraud and expose private data by automating actions normally done by humans 

through web forms. In the end, the API provides the same benefits – ease of use, efficiency and flexibility 

– to both developers and bad actors. 

It’s important that compliance, privacy, and risk professionals dig deeper to understand the usage of APIs 

across the organization, and gain insight into the vulnerabilities that exist so that risk can be measured 



and mitigated. Unfortunately, the fragmented API management space, along with an increase in 

decentralized development, has created a situation where most enterprises lack even the most basic 

understanding of their API landscape. According to Aite Group, the organizations have an average of 

620 APIs – do you know where they all are, who owns them and what they do? 

Gaining visibility into your API footprint in the form of inventory, usage, potential vulnerabilities and 

specification conformance is vitally important to understand the overall exposure and compliance impact 

created by APIs in use. Some questions that every organization should be able to answer (but rarely can) 

include the following: 

• How many APIs do we have? What applications are these APIs used by or associated with? 

• How many were sanctioned by security and how many are “shadow” or unknown APIs? 

• Are they all necessary for operations or were deployed inadvertently or forgotten about after they 

were no longer necessary? 

• Which ones are not actively managed or monitored? Do they have traffic? Is the traffic expected, 

or do patterns suggest misuse? 

• How many APIs have vulnerabilities or don’t conform to approved API specifications? Do we have 

any hidden API headers, parameters or response codes? 

• Is there PII or sensitive data being transmitted through APIs unencrypted? Is access regulated 

data limited in a way that will keep us in compliance? 

Unfortunately, too many organizations get answers to these questions the hard way – when they are 

breached. For example, an API might expose too much information when a request is made providing 

attackers with insights, they can use to further breach a system. Or, an API might completely lack proper 

access authentication or inadvertently grant users with elevated privileges (like giving them Admin rights) 

which could be used to exfiltrate or change the data. 

"The hallmark of cyber attackers is they are always searching for a path of least resistance. The 

expanding use of public facing APIs, especially those that are unknown, coupled with the lack of security 

associated with those APIs make them a prime target," says Charles Kolodgy, Principal at Security 

Mindsets LLC. "It is important for organizations to know what APIs are used by the website, especially 

shadow APIs, in order to secure them thus making it more difficult for cyber criminals to achieve their end 

goal." 

While there are security tools that address some aspects of API security, this problem of visibility needs 

to be solved. 

“If your organization delivers APIs to external parties, such as your customers or partners, you need a 

centralized place to help monitor the security posture and compliance of all your published APIs, detect 

any risks immediately, and respond proactively to mitigate risks of data exfiltration,” says Subbu Iyer, VP 

of product for Cequence Security. “The first step in developing a mature API security and compliance 

program is to discover all the APIs your organization delivers to external parties and analyze their risk 

postures.” 




Matt Keil, Director of Product Marketing, Cequence Security 

Matt Keil joined Cequence Security in April of 2019 as a member of 

the product marketing team, driving product related messaging and 

outbound content creation. Prior to joining Cequence Security, Mr. 

Keil worked at Palo Alto Networks for 12 years, where he was part 

of the team that launched the company and his most current role 

was Director of Product Marketing for Public Cloud. Cumulatively, 

Mr. Keil has 18 years of experience in the enterprise network 

security market, working for Check Point Software, 

NetScreen/Juniper Networks, then Palo Alto Networks and Now 

Cequence Security. 



HIPAA Compliance and The Protection of Cyber Security 

By Andrew Mikhailov, CTO at Zfort Group 

Businesses face the risk of severe cyber-attacks - the present-day cyberspace criminals are wellorganized, 

thoughtful, and marketable. And one of the most sensitive sectors exposed to privacy 

risk is the healthcare system. If hackers manage to get in, they would have access to patient health 

data, which they could sell to global entities with evil intentions. 

About 15% of all data breaches in 2019 involved the healthcare system. As a result, the estimated losses 

for this industry in 2019 reached $25 billion. "Over the last three years, the number of breaches, lost 

medical records, and settlements of fines is staggering. During this span, nearly 140 million 

medical records were involved in a privacy breach", - writes Eric Thompson, a cyber security leader 

in his book. 

In 2019, an Israeli cyber security center found a computer virus that added tumors into MRI and CT 

scans. This malware could also remove actual malignant growths from image files to prevent patients 

from getting the care they need. The researchers showed the safety holes to sow doubt about the 

health of government figures, commit insurance fraud, or be part of a terrorist attack. 



In this situation, basic security tools such as antivirus or firewalls are no longer making the cut. 

Healthcare information security obeys data protection laws, particularly the Health Insurance Portability 

and Accountability Act (HIPAA) applies in the US. 

If a data breach occurs, HIPAA regulation presupposes financial and criminal penalties. HIPAA 

outlines requirements to keep the personal health information of clients and patients safe. 

What Does HIPAA Protect? 

An average incident costs a company about $6.45 million. Thus, organizations should consider both 

whether they are compliant and whether all the risks are considered. Generally speaking, HIPAA restricts 

uses and disclosures to healthcare operations, the provision of treatment, or payment for healthcare 

unless the patient agreed to provide information to a third party, and HIPAA gave authorization. 

HIPAA Security Rule ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of health information. Its 

Privacy Rule directs the uses and disclosures of health information (the HIPAA Privacy Rule). Thus, these 

elements help Covered Entities and their Business Associates to protect Electronic Protected Health 

Information (ePHI). The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) outlines who HIPAA refers 

to in its definition of a Covered Entity. 

The HHS Office For Civil Rights (OCR) manages HIPAA. They conduct audits to ensure compliance with 

the Covered Entities and businesses that control medical data. HIPAA audits are conducted to track 

progress on compliance and to identify areas to improve. 

These protected records include diagnoses, treatment information, test results, medications, health 

insurance ID numbers, and other identifiers. HIPAA also covers contact information, including phone 

numbers, addresses, email addresses, birthdates, and demographic information. So, while the OCR 

prepares for the next HIPAA audits, businesses ought to make sure they are ready. 

Why HIPAA Needs Cyber Security? 

HIPAA Security Rule specifies that Covered Entities need to establish and maintain protections for ePHI. 

Moreover, protection must defend the organization against breach through any physical, administrative, 

and technical means. The rule mandates that HIPAA-compliant organizations: 

● All the health data sent, stores, received, or produced has strong confidentiality. It means that it 

can be available only to authorized people to access, change, or remove it. The data should also 

be always available for authorized individuals. 

● Threats to data integrity or security should be predicted whenever possible. Organizations should 

defend against any information disclosure or use not allowed by HIPAA. 



● Verifying that the workforce complies with this law is also a business's responsibility. 

Under this regulation, companies will need to implement technical and procedural checks to protect this 

information and perform risk analysis on risk and vulnerabilities to the confidentiality, integrity, and 

availability of ePHI. Technical controls include such things as encryption, authentication, password 

complexity, access auditing, and segmentation. Procedural controls normally include password 

policies, incident response plans, contingency plans, and audit procedures. 

Nowadays, healthcare information is part of the Big Data revolution and exists in a range of different 

digital ecosystems. In the healthcare industry, patients use wearables and implantable IoT medical 

devices such as heart monitors and pacemakers. With all these items now connected to the Internet, the 

data gets exposed to cyberattacks. 

With the number of IoT devices increasing every year, most of them do not have endpoint security. That 

being said, it is vital to have a plan to protect your company's HIPAA data. One of the major security 

issues is how the device collects the information and then transmits it to the hospital. From an ePHI and 

HIPAA compliance viewpoint, this is a risk your business must understand and develop a protection 

strategy. 

As we can see, cyber security and HIPAA compliance are strongly connected. Unfortunately, being 

HIPAA compliant does not make your organization safe from cybercriminals. At the same time, 

having a robust cyber security program does not make you HIPAA compliant as well. Your business 

needs a comprehensive HIPAA compliance and security provider to guarantee your patients' data's 

genuine security. 

The industry should develop a holistic strategy for healthcare security, including administrative, physical, 

and technical safeguards. 

Strategies for Improving Cyber Security 

HIPAA rules are not enough to resist cybercrime. Looking at precisely what this law requires, it doesn't 

necessarily align with cyber security best practices. Besides, healthcare organizations shouldn't see 

cyber security and HIPAA compliance as separate components, but rather as two concepts working 

parallel to one another. In fact, a robust cyber security program supports compliance. 

To ensure cyber security in healthcare and prevent sophisticated attacks, healthcare organizations can 

implement the following practices: 

1. Review your current security risk analyses and identify gaps and areas for improvement. Check that 

risk analysis is documented to guarantee regulatory compliance, enhancing the risk analysis's attorneyclient 

privilege. 



2. Assess risk management plans to make sure that measures to reduce vulnerabilities identified. Adopt 

the best practices used in healthcare. It’s a must to use unique IDs, strong passwords, role-based 

permissions, auto time-out and screen lock. 

3. Compare HIPAA and other cyber-related policies and procedures against legal and regulatory 

obligations, and ensure they are updated based on the results of your most recent risk analysis. 

4. Expect the unexpected. Prepare safety incident response plans that meet HIPAA requirements and 

other applicable laws for your business to be ready to respond to a possible data breach. Besides, leave 

some room in your strategy for the unexpected. This could include everything from hacker attacks to 

natural disasters, threatening your healthcare records, and other vital assets. 

5. Create backups and develop a recovery plan. While creating backups seems like a common-sense 

thing, it can be missed in a small practice environment. Ensure that the medium used to store your backup 

data is safe and cannot be wiped out by an attack that would take down your office systems. 

6. Make additional investments in people, processes, technology, and management. Defending digital 

assets can no longer be delegated solely to the IT staff. Instead, security planning needs to be blended 

into new product and service, security, development plans, and business initiatives. 

You can't afford to neglect cyber security or compliance. That is why it is critical to match them together 

in a secure network that protects your patients and your reputation. 


From 2017 as a CTO at Zfort Group, Andrew Mikhailov concentrates on 

growing the company into the areas of modern technologies like Artificial 

Intelligence, BigData, and IoT. Being a CTO, Andrew doesn’t give up 

programming himself because it is critical for some of the projects Andrew 

curates as a CTO. 

Andrew LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-mikhailov- 

66571912/ 

Contact Andrew: andrei.michaiolov@gmail.com 



Smart Gadgets in Proving Workplace Violence 

By Milica D. Djekic 

The violence at the workplace could start as the common insult, continue as the verbal abuse and end 

up as the mobbing attack that could get correlated with any way of the psychological assault. In other 

words, it’s quite obvious why any kind of the workplace violence should go under the Criminal Code and 

why the cases of any sort of the mobbing are treated as the crime. The point is anyone breaching the 

behavioral codex at the work should get reported to the authorities as they could use such information to 

run the investigation. In the business surrounding, there is no place for the personal level as there are 

the recommended methods of dealing with the co-workers. Also, any kind of abusive and rude behavior 

should get stated to the manager as he would find the way to resolve such an incidental situation. The 

well-developed organizations should get adopted the best practice how to tackle such a concern and in 

so many cases the abusive employees could get suspended from the work or even fired with the 

complaint to the Police as they would deeply break the law and put anyone under the stressful condition. 

The stress is the huge disadvantage to anyone and the person coping with such a state could suffer the 

real traumatic syndromes. In addition, there are a plenty of sensitive working groups including the persons 

with disability or any kind of disorder that should get handled carefully as they could get deeply affected 

with any kind of the violent behavior. According to the United Nations conventions these people need the 

extra care and any employer getting those guys in its team is the equal opportunity employment provider 



and it would go under the entire procedure of benefits and appreciations giving the chance to such hard 

working individuals to contribute. 

On the other hand, it could be quite difficult managing the person with the inappropriate vocabulary, poor 

manners and any lack of the good family education and does not matter how those persons being 

effective at the work or not – they should learn their behavior is adequate for the street, not the office. 

The office is not the place for the unkind persons as everyone in the business is overloaded enough with 

his tasks and schedules, so what the people need the most is the support and fair treatment. Anyone 

being exposed to the workplace violence is the victim of the crime and no intelligent employer would 

tolerate such a behavior. Why? If you support someone being so aggressive about the other people 

mostly for his intent to obtain some of his commonly unrealistic ambitions and prove some sort of the 

professionalism – you are doing so wrong. There are the ways to investigate and prove the violence at 

the work and anyone encouraging such an atmosphere at the workplace is committing the crime as well. 

Sometimes the employee being the victim of the mobbing would complain to the manager seeking from 

him to resolve such an incident and the manager would show the insufficient skill to deal with such a 

situation, so probably being driven with some irrationalities he would just fire the person who reported 

the abusive behavior at the workplace. In other words, it’s not professional at all getting no business 

manners and being so subjective about everyone. The victim of the mobbing needs support as everyone 

deserves the respect and even if there are no well-developed procedures and policies in the organization 

how to tackle such a concern – the employer should know that it must discourage such a tendency. 

The business arena is like the other sport courts – it’s not enough to deal with the skill only, you need to 

cope with the fair play and meet so strict requirements and rules. If you are abusive in any sport and that 

can happen especially if you lose your tamper – you would definitely suffer some restrictions suggesting 

you that the sport’s battlefield is not the place to heal your deep frustrations on anyone and anything. The 

similar situation is with the business! It’s not sufficient to get competitive only – you need to operate 

according to the law; otherwise, you are not legally acceptable at all. No legal business would need the 

troubling staffs at most and if anyone tolerates such a condition in his office that person is equally guilty 

as anyone committing the crime over his co-workers. Simply, it’s not about the unhealthy relations at the 

work – it’s about the criminal justice case. The rules are rules and no one could avoid them, so it’s clear 

that any kind of the violent behavior at the work could pull with itself some legal sanctions. It’s quite 

difficult working in the office with so disturbed working correlations and anyone belonging to the sensitive 

group of the people could develop some sort of the shock or the real trauma that could get confirmed 

through the medical examinations. So, if you do not want to pay a lot for your lack of ethics about your 

staffs – you should develop the good behavioral codex that would cope with all possible legal frameworks 

and regulations, so far. 

The fact is we live at the quite fast pace and the people could get anxious for so many reasons. 

Apparently, that’s not the reason to take all your private frustrations with yourself and embarrass the other 

people with all of those. If you feel the stress about anything in your life – just attend your doctor and he 

would prescribe you the adequate remedies on. For instance, in the developed countries – the autism is 

so treatable condition and any kid suffering from so would never get left without any social care and 

attention. In other words, there are a plenty of programs supporting such a sensitive group of the people. 

In our opinion, the reason why so many people would break the law in the working environment is that 

they would suffer some kind of the psychological concern. Maybe they would get stressed, worried or 

scared about something, so they would not choose to look for the healthcare support – but they would 

rather express themselves as troubling and deal in the quite uncivilized and impatient manners putting 

their everything on the risk. It’s the 21 st century and it’s not the shame seeking the medical advice or 

attending your healthcare professional for any reason. Anyone with the modern beliefs should understand 

so! 



Through this effort, we would try to discuss the need of smart gadgets in proving the violence in the 

workplace. At this stage, it’s quite clear that there are the methodologies and steps to evident that sort of 

the crime, but the point is if the recordings of the smart gadgets regarding some incidental situations 

could get approved as the valid clues in the criminal justice case – that could open up nearly limitless 

options to those gadgets manufacturers to get the bigger marketplace for their solutions that could get in 

need for many people. In other words, if you get the permission to record some condition and if such a 

recording is the valid proof, the number of your customers would increase as those products could be 

trusted by the authorities. At this moment, there are so many companies worldwide that can make the 

wide spectrum of the smart gadgets for practically any usage and the majority of those products are 

attested which guarantees they would work accurately, but if someone makes the legal regulations 

suggesting their footage could serve in the criminal justice case under the defined conditions – it’s clear 

that so many people could buy those gadgets in order to prevent or prove something getting deeply 

illegal. 

In other words, this effort is all about the proposed business ideas and some explanations how the good 

business plan could cope with the marketplace demands. Also, it’s the suggestion to many governments 

across the globe how to leverage their economies putting into their laws and frameworks the outputs of 

the emerging technologies as stuffs that could find their applications even under the Criminal Code, so 

far. 

Assumption #1. The workplace violence could be a consequence of the stress. 

Explanation #1. Getting at the work day by day and coping with no break could be quite annoying. 

Apparently, there are some lunch pauses, but sooner or later you would get aware that you are beginning 

preoccupied with your daily schedule. For such a reason, it’s recommended by the medical experts to 

make at least a half of hour break per a working day. Would this support you remaining fresh through the 

entire working week? Probably yes, but many people would need some holiday time to recover from the 

heavy tasks and renew their energy resources. The fact is so many professions cannot offer to their staffs 

to take that long leave and those employees could count on the several days off per a year. The fact is 

in so many cases those hard working persons would not get even the weekend off. Many would say they 

would be in the shape to work that hard, but sooner or later they would deal with the deeply accumulated 

stress. For such a reason, it’s recommended to keep your professional manners and try to avoid any sort 

of bullying at the work. Why? You do not need anyone to provoke you as you do not need to provoke 

anyone as that person can get back to you. In the both cases, the conflicting situation is unavoidable and 

even if you are trying to appear as perfect someone could try to challenge your perfection targeting your 

psyche being oversaturated with the stress and if you make an incident you would need to provide so 

many explanations before you return things into balance. So, if anyone chooses the workplace violence 

as the response to the stress in the workplace it’s clear that’s the result of overtiredness, shocking events 

and a lot of struggling with the schedules and deadlines. The good manager should take all these into 

consideration as he would be responsible for his employees’ wellbeing. The fact is so many outsourcing 

businesses would choose the less developed parts of the world to run the business as the workforce 

would be cheap, but suitable – so the profits getting available from there would be so high. Any business 

is about the risk and if the government of some developing economy attracts the investors to make a 

factory in their country they should know there would be a plenty of challenges to get managed for a 

reason those communities could be the sources of some kind of instability. The smart investors would 

take everything into account and as they would cope with the paid intelligence on a daily basis they would 

figure out if it is worth that to take such a risk on. Any profit maker would want to get the highest possible 

incomes from his activities counting on the lowest feasible expanses, so far. For such a reason, those 

clever guys would offer the minimal salary to their staffs in order to reduce that sort of the cost. The 

people must feed their families from those wedges and on the other hand, their employers would seek 



the maximal level of the professionalism, productivity and effectiveness in return. In the case of the 

outsourcing business, it would appear someone would exploit someone. Also, the situation in the 

developed countries is not far more different as any capitalist would want to take advantage on the 

marketplace and his key players would get satisfied with their incomes, but they would need to push hard 

and hard as well as offer the new and innovative solutions and approaches pulling the entire company 

ahead. In other words, those guys are not the part of the assembly business as the case is with the 

developing societies. They are someone who would be with the brain and who would need to create the 

ingenious ideas on. Does not matter if you would work for the normative or the new business strategy 

sooner or later you would figure out that the stress is something that can distract you from being wellproductive 

and well-creative. In other words, if you are overloaded day by day even the good intended 

suggestion from your co-worker could make you attempt the workplace violence and once that happens 

you would be in the trouble. Basically, it’s up to your manger how hard you would need to work. Anyone 

making the profit would want your maximal effort for the minimal time and if you can provide the 

encouraging results within so short deadlines you would get the compliments that you are competitive. If 

not, the people would just say thank you for everything! That’s quite stressful, right? 

Assumption #2. Employees with the medical condition could be more sensitive to stress. 

Explanation #2. If you hire a person with disability or another medical condition, you should be extremely 

careful how you would mange that staff. Those persons could be partially dysfunctional about some sorts 

of the tasks, but if managed skillfully they can give their maximum with something. The disability could 

be mental, physical, sensing or the other and even if you want to hire the totally blind person you should 

know that individual can contribute as well and get some kind of personal satisfaction for getting the 

chance to work. There are a lot of blind people who would deliver the online classes in the foreign 

language. Maybe they would not see well enough, but they would hear exceptionally and adopt some 

skills using their bright minds. It’s not always pushing the poor people aside and making them get 

marginalized. It’s about giving them opportunity to work and feed their kids. So, if you want to hire the 

person with the special condition, you need to provide him the special circumstances. Many people would 

believe that cyber defense area is only for the highly skillful persons. We would disagree with so! Even 

someone with the mental or physical disadvantage could become the IT security professional, but that 

person should not get discriminated at the beginning. There are so many talented people who cannot 

hear or walk, but they can sit in front of the screen and create so amazing software solutions being 

competitive even for the highest standard IT industries. The fact is those guys are so sensitive to the 

stress and it needs the skill to manage them. Remember the Rain Man and the guy with the autism who 

got the genius mind. That’s what we talk about! Just try to figure out what could happen if anyone wanted 

to discriminate that person. The situation in the developing world in such a sense is hard. There are still 

a lot of unresolved concerns about the support and opportunities those folks get from their communities. 

Practically, there are some legal regulations, but they are not strictly followed and someone who could 

contribute in some manner would stay without the chance to even attempt to do so. On the other hand, 

the developed societies would show some care about those guys and they would create them the 

conditions to work and progress in their occupation. So surprisingly, some companies from the developed 

economies that would run the outsourcing business would choose to remain blind in front of those 

people’s needs probably for the reason their local sources would suggest them it’s better to pay some 

penalties to the government than to hire the person with disability. Would there be the difference between 

the guy with disability in the developed and developing economy? Basically, no! So, the only reasons 

why some respectful companies would not treat those people equally as they would do in their counties 

are so irrational stories from their outsourcing managers who would not cope with the skill to handle those 

hard working individuals. Luckily, the rational part of the human kind would not discriminate anyone and 

that’s why we have the Paralympics Games every single season across the globe. If the business is only 



who would take advantage over whom a lot of brilliant people would miss the chance to make something 

out of their lives. No one can succeed on his own and indeed, there is the need for support and 

encouragement from the entire community. The nations that would help their people make a progress 

would be the nations of successful people, while the small nations would look for the chance to revenge 

leading themselves to suffering and nothing else. In other words, go beyond your limits and think big no 

matter how poor your conditions are. 

Assumption #3. The stress management techniques could reduce the violence at work. 

Explanation #3. The people under the stressful condition could develop some kind of anxiety, tension or 

fear about what is going on around them. That sort of negative emotion could sabotage their efforts to be 

productive and effective at the workplace. Also, they can react so aggressively if anyone says anything 

because they are overloaded with their obligations. In addition, the people can express the violence for 

working hard and making some kind of the flaw that could go under the self-criticism or the criticism of 

their surroundings. Simply, they are a lot of reasons why someone can feel the pressure and give so 

assaultive response to that condition. The experience in criminology would suggest that so many violent 

offenders have been the victims of mobbing in some period of their lives. So, if someone is under the 

pressure chronically that person can develop resilience or respond with the dose of despite and probably 

some kind of the violence. The good manager should understand the limits as well as the strong and 

weak sides of his team and so skillfully manage all of them on. If the conflict occurs, the team leader 

should know how to put it under the control and following the procedures so carefully investigate what 

have happened for real. It’s not only about collecting the claims through the catch up interview; it’s more 

about coping with the best practice how the inconvenient situation could get resolved peacefully. Any 

competitive organization should deal with such a level of the development and also, it’s necessary to 

organize some sort of the stress management workshops for your employees as they could get the free 

advice and instruction how to reduce their amount of the stress. It’s also about the level of trust and 

confidence the employees have about each other as sometimes there is the need to openly talk about 

your concerns without any fear that you would get put under the wrong and misunderstanding 

interpretation. In other words, the co-workers should see each other as support, not the competitors as 

they work united like a team in order to beat the competition on the marketplace for their employer. Every 

good manager should know that and if anyone complains to him that person should receive the support 

to overcome such a situation. The point is being assertive, not revenging! If you maintain that “I win – 

You win” attitude you would easily figure out it’s all about solidarity and team effort that can make 

everyone succeeds. The main trick is anyone with the bad manners would take the criticism so personally 

and that person could try to do some kind of bullying once she got reported to her principles. The 

employees could warn about someone’s inappropriate behavior and it’s not always about the reward and 

punishment – it’s about teaching the staffs how to work as the one. The fact is the stress management 

training could be so expansive and the employer that wants to reduce his costs would not pay even a 

cent for that, in his opinion, unnecessary stuff. That’s the quite wrong decision for a reason those sorts 

of things could serve as the good preventive measure in avoiding the violence at the workplace. 

Apparently, the good employer should get developed the adequate procedures, policies and best 

practices for tackling that spectrum of situations. Any kind of the mobbing is something that goes under 

the Criminal Code and anyone who wants to remain within the legal constrains would try to prevent that 

sort of behavior amongst his organization. So, the stress management techniques could reduce the 

workplace violence and it’s not wasting of anything protecting your own interests investing into that sort 

of prevention, so far. 



Assumption #4. Smart gadgets could serve in monitoring a condition of the organism. 

Explanation #4. The stress is the natural follower of any organism’s activity and according to some 

studies there is the certain amount of the stress the body can handle. Anything above that could be 

disadvantaging to the health and cause some acute or chronical medical conditions. So, if it’s defined by 

some medical research studies which level of the stress can impact our health and how long it’s 

necessary to get under that condition in order to develop some symptoms – it’s quite clear that anyone 

or anything throwing us through such a drawback could deal with some kind of guiltiness or crime’s 

responsibility. In other words, if your boss is doing the mobbing about you every single day and if you 

can notice through your smart hand-wear that your heart rate is increasing then and especially if that is 

happening day by day – you can say that such a guy is directly responsible for your cardiovascular 

disorder. So, if your smart watch is telling you your body is in the concerning condition and if such a 

product has passed through the laboratory testing and validation, so it got the approval it works accurately 

– it’s obvious that the recordings of that gadget can serve as something for proving something else being 

under the criminal justice. The point is if the law makers would create the law suggesting that those 

footages could get used as the valid evidence in the case for proving someone guiltiness in causing the 

stressful condition and directly affecting someone’s wellbeing that could mean anyone getting the 

capacity to manufacture those devices could sell them on the marketplace for a reason the people would 

buy them in order to assure the liability of their claims in front of the authorities. So, if your blood pressure 

is going up and your heart rate is getting arrhythmic because of someone’s violence in the workplace 

there are the ways to prove that condition and leave the minimal space to the suspect to bend the truth 

on the court. On the other hand, the law makers could make a decision to put something like so into the 

legal framework because of the interests of their economies that could progress taking advantage over 

that sort of the business. It’s all about the business and in so many times it’s not enough to tell your story 

to your doctor in order to prove something. Apparently, there are so many approved methods in colleting 

the evidence, but once you get in position to deal with something such a rigid and touchable no one could 

try to avoid the responsibility. The stress is so unhealthy and only very few people would welcome so 

and, in other words, it would harm anyone’s organism and anyone causing the harm is committing the 

crime, right? For such a reason the mobbing is seen as the crime in so many countries across the world. 

In addition, if you cope with your passively aggressive co-worker who would give you some sort of the 

psychological pressure and violence, you can easily suggest him that your smart gadget can record how 

you feel about him and once that recording gets the valid evidence on the court that aggressive person 

get count on the punishment only. At this stage, the medical forensic investigators could count on the 

approved procedures on statements gathering as well as expert’s estimation of the made disadvantages. 

On the other hand, if you have reported the incident to the authorities and if even them can catch the 

internet signal from your smart gadget – it’s obvious how the case could get its strength in front the public. 

The good thing about the smart devices is that they got assigned their IP address and apparently, that’s 

the security concern, but also so convenient channel to the investigation to trace what such a gadget can 

sense or measure. What’s needed is to approve that methodology in the legal fashion as well as provide 

the devices’ manufacturers to obtain the right to produce the solutions that could serve as the evidence 

collectors. 

Comments 

In this effort, we would provide a deep insight into the certain topic in order to explain some of its 

perspectives in more details. In our opinion, such a review could get used as the starting point to the 

development of some security and safety procedures and policies. Also, it could help to the law 

enforcement and intelligence agencies to navigate some investigative process as well as create the law 

enforcement and intelligence knowledge bases. Next, this effort could support the forensic detectives 

and investigators in their need to clarify some aspects of their work. In addition, those could be the helpful 

updates to the law makers to cover on and respond to all the security challenges through the appropriate 



legal frameworks and regulations. In our belief, some suggestions to the best practice in the criminal 

justice environment have been made as well. Finally, this review would cope with some business ideas 

and it could serve as the encouragement to an emerging marketplace economy, so far. 


Milica D. Djekic is an Independent Researcher from Subotica, 

Republic of Serbia. She received her engineering background from the 

Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Belgrade. She writes 

for some domestic and overseas presses and she is also the author of 

the book “The Internet of Things: Concept, Applications and Security” 

being published in 2017 with the Lambert Academic Publishing. Milica 

is also a speaker with the BrightTALK expert’s channel. She is the 

member of an ASIS International since 2017 and contributor to the 

Australian Cyber Security Magazine since 2018. Milica's research 

efforts are recognized with Computer Emergency Response Team for the European Union (CERT-EU), 

Censys Press and EASA European Centre for Cybersecurity in Aviation (ECCSA). Her fields of interests 

are cyber defense, technology and business. Milica is a person with disability. 



Cyber Against Granny 

By Yotam Gutman, SentinelOne 

Every year, cybercriminals steal approximately $40 billion from older adults (senior citizens aged 60 and 

over) in the United States. Cybercrime can be defined as “any criminal activity in which a computer (or 

networked device) is targeted and/or used.” Cybercriminals with access to an older adult person’s 

information via a computer, smartphone, or other networked device, can easily exploit it for nefarious 

intent, defined as “an act of forcing, compelling, or exerting undue influence over a vulnerable adult 

causing the vulnerable adult to act in a way that is inconsistent with relevant past behavior or causing the 

vulnerable adult to perform services for the benefit of another”. 

The scope of bad actors targeting senior citizens can be explained by the lack of experience and skills in 

using computers/technology among the elderly, against the growing popularity of computer systems held 

by people of the same age, and the fact that most of them have credit cards. 

In the past, people in their 70s and 80s hardly ever used computers. Nowadays, people of the same age 

have social media accounts, surf the Internet, and of course use smartphones. 

Unlike their younger counterparts, seniors are less aware of cyber threats and, in many cases, lack the 

tools and experience to identify attacks and fraudulent attempts. Even elderly people with no access to 

computers or smartphones can fall victim to cyber-related crime such as in the case where their personal 

details have been leaked from a database and sold to criminals who can then exploit. Seniors also give 



ad actors the highest hit rates from phone phishing scams with frequent attempts being compromise of 

personal information and news of harm/captivity of the elderly’s children. 

Most of the crimes against the adult population use a similar pattern as fraud against the elderly with no 

connection to computers (such as telemarketing of unnecessary services by highly aggressive sales 

reps). 

The criminals will reach out to those people in a non-suspicious manner - sending a legitimate-looking 

email, offering to connect on Facebook or by using a legitimate website that offers them some vacation 

or other prize. The criminals will then try to obtain the details of those people. In particular, they will seek 

credit card and identification details that allow them to use these cards. Another tactic is impersonating 

a person in need and requesting a transfer of funds. 

Recently, the FBI arrested a network of criminals impersonating other people (“Captain Garcia” of the US 

military stationed in Syria, for example) who then persuaded their victims - many of whom were elderly - 

to transfer money to various causes, all of which were fictitious. 

Another favorite method of criminals is impersonating "official" entities - government officials, 

municipalities and various authorities, while exploiting the trust (or innocence) of those veteran citizens 

and fraudulently obtaining their details. 

In addition, this population is exposed to "normal" cybercrime - phishing, infection by malware and theft 

of personal information. The only difference is that the likelihood of this population recognizing such an 

attack is extremely slim, as the ability of people in this age group to understand that they have been 

compromised and to seek assistance is minimal. It should be noted that such attacks can also be carried 

out against people through their smartphones, which are very popular with this age group. These devices 

are usually not installed with protection software that could alert the user to malicious websites or warn 

them of attempts to exfiltrate personal details from the device. 

What can be done? 

It all starts and ends with education, but this time it is the younger generation which needs to educate 

their parents. We should remember the warnings they repeatedly told us when we were younger, and 

echo similar messages back to them, though in a slightly different way: 

- Know your friends and enemies: research shows that the elderly are oblivious to cyber risks, so it's 

worthwhile explaining to them some basic concepts and providing them with some examples of criminal 

or fraudulent online activities for them to learn from and avoid. 

- Do not open the door to strangers, and do not receive anything from strangers: Any communication 

from a party that they do not know personally should be treated with caution. It’s wise to assume all 

profiles on social networks are fake until proven otherwise. 

-Don't tell anyone any personal information - even if you are convinced that you are in contact with an 

official, or a real person - do not provide credit card details, residential address or social security number 

- certainly not by email or messenger. 



- If there is any suspicion, call "a responsible adult" - if requests are made to provide contact information, 

it is advisable to consult a person who is well-versed in security to see that the site is genuine. Yes, that 

person could be your 13-year-old grandson! 

- If something looks too good to be true, it's probably not true - this old adage is just as true in the online 

world as it is in the physical world. Resist those tempting offers that pop up while browsing for weird apps 

that install themselves on the mobile device, and avoid those people who offer big, congested "if only" 

details or who to send you money. 

Conclusion 

Unfortunately, today's elderly will continue to be the victims of cybercrime. This phenomenon will likely 

become worse before getting better as more elderly dabble in technology their generation adopts digital 

means of payment and banking through smartphones. It will probably take years until the generation who 

"grew up using computers" come of age, and are immune to such scams with their decades of built-in 

experience and suspicion of every poor girl from Nigeria who needs a hundred dollars a month to buy 

dresses for school. Until then, watch out for your parents, and help guard them against those they cannot 

guard against themselves. 

Aspen initiative for protecting older users online- 

https://www.aspentechpolicyhub.org/project/protecting-older-users-online/ 


Lt. Commander (Ret.) Israel Navy, Yotam Gutman, has 

filled several operational, technical, and business positions 

at defense, HLS, Intelligence, and cybersecurity 

companies, and provided consulting services for numerous 

others. Yotam joined SentinelOne 6 months ago to oversee 

local marketing activities in Israel and contribute to the 

global content marketing team. Yotam founded and 

managed the Cybersecurity Marketing Professionals 

Community, which includes over 300 marketing 

professionals from more than 170 cyber companies. Yotam 

was chosen as one of the 5 Security Influencers to 

Follow on LinkedIn. 



Are the Worst Cryptocurrency Security Breaches Behind 

Us? 

By Tim Fries, Co-Founder, The Tokenist 

You would be right in assuming that blockchain itself was never hacked, but that doesn’t mean people 

don’t like to give up security features for the sake of convenience. Crypto exchanges are especially 

notorious for mass hacks that besmirch the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. 

Moreover, no matter what kind of crypto wallet you have, due to the decentralized nature of 

cryptocurrencies, it’s akin to having a bank account in your pocket. In the end, we may as well rely upon 

the insured deposits of web-based wallets – crypto exchanges – more than anything else. 



People Demand Digital Money 

It may surprise you to learn that the concept of internet money did not start with the first cryptocurrency 

in the form of Bitcoin (BTC). In fact, the most ancient and pervasive form of money – gold – was the first 

basis for digital currency in 1996. Called e-gold, it was effectively a stablecoin before there was such a 

thing. Anyone with an e-gold account was able to transfer money equivalent in value to grams of gold to 

other e-gold accounts. Unfortunately, it grew too much in popularity before the government shut it down 

in 2008. 

E-gold may have ultimately failed as a digital currency, which is what people called it at the time, but it 

demonstrated a high demand for money that is not externally tempered with and controlled by 

governments. Just one year later, Bitcoin emerged on the scene as a digital currency entirely confined to 

the digital realm and outside government control. As Bitcoin gained more traction and value, the legacy 

media became fever-pitched in tying Bitcoin to the criminal underground. 

Fortunately, all their efforts failed along with their trustworthiness. On the other hand, the most current 

data on Bitcoin adoption rate provided by The Tokenist, tells a story of increased trust in Bitcoin over 

traditional institutions, by 29%. The upward shift in Bitcoin trust and familiarity is primarily led by male 

millennials, while people older than 65 are least likely to own and use Bitcoin. 

The latter part is important to note because older people represent a demographic that views money as 

something that is strictly: 

1. Physical 

2. Government-controlled 

Regardless of age, we can safely say that these two money attributes are more or less present in the 

minds of all demographic groups. Therefore, they represent substantial psychological barriers to 

overcome for further cryptocurrency adoption. Thankfully, the government’s reaction to the coronavirus 

greatly eroded the embedded notion that money, as physical and government-controlled, is inherently 

superior to digital money. 

When the Federal Reserve decided to summon trillions of dollars on multiple occasions to save the 

market from totally crashing, no one with a straight face could say ever again that government money is 

derived from real wealth. On the other hand, Bitcoin draws from a predetermined, finite pool of coins, with 

each Bitcoin ever-growing in value. 

However, there is another aspect to digital money that makes people instinctively distrust it – 

cybersecurity. In particular, the prevailing sentiment that anything digital is hackable. 



Shortcuts Lead to Cryptocurrency Vulnerability 

Although fiat money can be counterfeited, it’s almost unheard of with the modern protections applied in 

the money printing presses. This is not the case with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. There are many 

cases of mass Bitcoin thefts/hacks from crypto exchanges, such as Japan’s Mt. Gox, Bitcoin7, Bitomat, 

Linode, BTC-e, Bitcoinica, Bitfloor, Vicurex, and Hong Kong’s Bitfinex as the largest case of hacking with 

120,000 BTC stolen. 

Moreover, an alternative marketplace powered by cryptocurrencies, Silk Road, greatly harmed the public 

image of new digital money. Operating in the underbelly of the internet, the Tor network, Silk Road 

facilitated many hacker attacks, money laundering, and blackmail operations. Criminal activity in this 

sector not only harms the directly-affected crypto-holders, but it suppresses further adoption of 

blockchain-powered digital money. 

In the best of times, outside of stablecoins, cryptocurrencies suffer from volatility compared to fiat money. 

Big crypto exchange hacks cause the price of Bitcoin to plummet, which then drags down all lesser 

cryptocurrencies with it. Inevitably, this further increases cryptocurrency volatility and decreases its usage 

as money. 

With all this in mind, it bears emphasizing that blockchain still remains effectively unhackable. People 

lost money from crypto exchange hacks because users gave their private keys to these companies. By 

doing that, a user forgoes a vital security feature of cryptocurrencies – private and public keys – and 

places all the trust into crypto exchanges for the sake of convenience. 

Unhackable Blockchain is Only the Beginning of Cybersecurity 

Let’s face it. If digital currencies operated under any other system other than blockchain, only hardcore 

enthusiasts and first-time adopters would flirt with that kind of digital money. As it stands, blockchain, as 

a distributed ledger across nodes, can withstand any malicious attempts at record alteration. This is why 

numerous governmental and corporate organizations, from military to healthcare and art galleries, have 

started to view blockchain as a low-cost, high-end implementation of cybersecurity. 

As we have seen with the latest hacking of Twitter accounts, the human factor is the weakest link in the 

cybersecurity chain. In this instance, they befriended the Twitter employee on Discord and then 

convinced the employee with some extra incentives to share the administrator account. 

Likewise, Bitcoin thefts and breaches occur outside the impervious blockchain: 

• Opting to give crypto-exchanges your private key instead of using private wallets – hard, mobile, 

or desktop. Then, you must rely on the company in charge of the crypto exchange to have 

trustworthy employees and security measures. 

• Opting to have a private wallet with both private and public keys, but not securing it enough. 

Usually, by leaving passwords and word phrases in other unprotected locations and files. 



• Falling for scams by email, imposter websites, and apps (or Twitter…) 

• Acquiring malware by visiting scam websites and opening files in your email from untrustworthy 

sources. Then, this malware gains access to your web-based wallet and is extremely difficult to 

remove. Some malware programs even scan your clipboard and text files to replace your 

cryptocurrency address with the address of the scammer. Other malware installs a miner to use 

your computer as a free mining resource. 

More skillful scammers have developed a roundabout way of taking your money, mainly by exploiting 

human nature. 

• As Bitcoin entered the mainstream news cycle and soared in value, people were starting to feel 

left out of the game. Trying to catch up with lesser, cheaper altcoins, they fell into the embrace of 

ICO scammers. In 2017, fake Initial Coin Offering (ICOs) was a huge problem, with at least 80% 

of ICOs uncovered as scams. 

• Pumping and dumping. Relying on the same sentiment as with ICO scams, pump and dump 

scammers have adopted a strategy of picking an altcoin low in market cap, buying it in bulk to 

spike its price, then selling it after other people bought it for an even higher price. 

• Closely related to the aforementioned Twitter hacking, you will also find celebrity impersonation 

scams. All of those hacked accounts of famous people were used as cryptocurrency giveaway 

scams. Usually, they promise to send you more than what you sent them, as a part of some kind 

of charity drive. 

As you can see, you can have fool-proof security in the form of blockchain and still be duped if you lack 

knowledge and discipline to resist baits. 

User-Education Must Come First 

Blockchain may be the revolutionary bulwark against hard hacks we were all waiting for, but soft hacks 

will continue to plague cryptocurrency users. Even outside of hacks and scams, cryptocurrency, with 

Bitcoin leading the charge, has become the perfect means of laundering money. Moreover, moneylaundering 

goes hand-in-hand with blackmail and ransom. 

Such is the flexibility of digital technology that cybercriminals don’t even have to hack anything at all. 

They can simply threaten to hack or insinuate to have some dirt on someone by using vague language, 

and the victim would then just have to send a certain cryptocurrency sum to their address. No physical 

contact, and no risk. 

At least, some careless cybercriminals would assume so. 



Only initially could you claim that Bitcoin is anonymous money. In 2011, that all changed with the first 

release of the block explorer. Because blockchain keeps an immutable ledger of all transactions, it only 

takes such a tool to track down every transaction. However, even this can be countered by creating 

multiple wallets and addresses with privacy-focused browsers such as Tor. Some cryptocurrencies, like 

Monero (XMR), are designed with untraceability as the core feature. 

Takeaway 

We can say that digital technology was inevitable. We can even say that blockchain was inevitable. We 

are lucky to live in the timeline where we have both. However, what we cannot say is that unbreachable 

cybersecurity is inevitable. No matter what kind of cybersecurity system we design, it will have to cater 

to the lowest common denominator – human markets. 


Tim Fries is co-founder of Protective Technologies Capital, an 

investment firm focused on helping owners of industrial 

technology businesses manage succession planning and 

ownership transitions. He is also co-founder of the financial 

education site The Tokenist. Previously, Tim was a member of 

the Global Industrial Solutions investment team at Baird Capital, 

a Chicago-based lower-middle market private equity firm. 



























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If you are looking for a cybersecurity expert who can make the difference from a nice event to 

a stellar conference, look no further email marketing@cyberdefensemagazine.com 



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i 

Multiple sources – Microsoft SIR, Verizon, etc. 

ii 

iii 

iv 

https://cybersecurityventures.com/global-ransomware-damage-costs-predicted-to-reach-20-billion-usd-by-2021/ 

https://www.recordedfuture.com/state-local-government-ransomware-attacks/ 

"Shut the door to cybercrime…" Ignite 2017, BRK3016, 35:45

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