Tag Archive for: importance

Cyber Resilience and Its Importance for Your Business

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What Is Cyber Resilience?

Computer Security Resource Center defines cyber resiliency as the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks or compromises on systems that use or are enabled by cyber resources.

Given today’s increasingly evolving threat landscape, cyber resilience has become an important factor in determining the success of an organization. Cyber resilience helps businesses defend against cybercrimes, mitigates risks and severity of attacks, and enables business continuity. A cyber-resilient business is well prepared to tackle cybersecurity incidents and can effectively respond to and quickly recover when such events do occur.

What Is the Difference Between Cybersecurity and Cyber Resilience?

Cybersecurity deals with strengthening an organization’s defenses to prevent cybercriminals and malicious programs from compromising its network, data and IT infrastructure. It encompasses strategies and actions to keep threat actors at bay and protect company assets from loss, theft or damage.

While cybersecurity is an essential part of an organization’s security strategy, protection from sophisticated cyberattacks is never guaranteed. This is where cyber resilience comes in. Cyber resilience encompasses a wider umbrella, including deploying policies, solutions and clearly defining the steps that need to be taken when measures such as cybersecurity fail.

Cyber resilience is a broader concept covering business continuity, securing critical business processes, identifying potential threat vectors, managing risks, minimizing the severity of attacks and implementing procedures to withstand cybersecurity incidents. Cyber resilience enables an organization to continue normal business operations without any interruption during and after disruptive events such as cyberattacks or technical failures. When done right, cyber resilience enables an organization to remain operational despite significant cyber disruptions.

Key Components of a Cyber Resilience Framework

Given the unprecedented surge in cybercrimes, most businesses would agree that cyberattacks are no longer a matter of “if” but “when.” As such, your business…

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Understanding the Importance of the CIS Controls

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Given that attacks are only increasing and there needs to be greater efficacy in how companies protect themselves, let us reference how the financial industry has created and relies on a body of standards to address issues in financial accounting as a defined comparison for Information Security.

To support this argument, there is a defined contrast between information security and Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

We’ll explore this relationship in more detail below. First, we’ll provide an overview of GAAP.

What Are Generally Accepted Accounting Principles?

According to Investopedia, the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) are a set of accounting principles, standards and procedures issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). They provide commonly accepted ways of recording and reporting accounting information. They also seek to standardize and regulate the definitions, assumptions and methods used in accounting across all industries.

Public companies in the United States must follow GAAP when their accountants compile their financial statements.

These 10 general concepts can help you remember the main mission of GAAP:

  1. Principle of Regularity: The accountant has adhered to GAAP rules and regulations as a standard.
  2. Principle of Consistency: Accountants commit to applying the same standards throughout the reporting process from one period to the next in order to ensure financial comparability between periods. Accountants are expected to fully disclose and explain the reasons behind any changed or updated standards in the footnotes to the financial statements.
  3. Principle of Sincerity: The accountant strives to provide an accurate and impartial depiction of a company’s financial situation.
  4. Principle of Permanence of Methods: The procedures used in financial reporting should be consistent to allow for a comparison of the company’s financial information.
  5. Principle of Non-Compensation: Both negatives and positives should be reported with full transparency and without the expectation of debt compensation
  6. Principle of Prudence: This emphasizes fact-based financial data representation that is not clouded by speculation.
  7. Principle…

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Pandemic Increases the Importance of Cyber Security

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TAMPA, Fla. — The pandemic has forced the entire world to rely heavily on their region’s transportation infrastructure — both the physical and virtual.

It’s increased the importance of cyber security as the world moves from offices to homes.

And the Tampa Bay area is not immune to these threats.

On February 8, an unknown hacker infiltrated Oldmar’s water treatment plant and made potentially dangerous changes to chemical levels in the water.

Now, the people who fight these threats are seeing seismic shifts in how the job is done.

Chris Grove is a Tampa Bay area resident and a Technology Evangelist for Nozomi Networks.

Nozomi Networks uses artificial intelligence to protect the security of critical infrastructure.

He’s been hooked on technology as long as he can remember, recalling his first encounter with Parker Bother’s Merlin, a 1978 handheld electronic game.

And it’s taken him around the world for the last decade, fighting cyber criminals, helping companies, and governments.

“So before Covid-19, I traveled between 100,000 to 200,00 miles a year, sometimes three continents in one week, sometimes all the way to Australia for a one-hour meeting,” said Grove. “Today my commute exists of the bedroom to the kitchen and then to my computer, which is a total of 50 feet.”

Grove and his “Road Warrior” counterparts have seen a rise in productivity as their heavy travel schedules turned into virtual sessions and remote work.

When regular international travel resumes, Grove says look for companies to send smaller groups on much fewer trips.

“I’m pretty sure that this is forever changed the landscape of business travel,” said Grove.

For the last year, Virginia Johnson has been talking to people about their life in the time of coronavirus.

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The importance of a strong password

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While very few of us could claim to be enjoying a stellar start to the year amid the coronavirus pandemic and the threat of global civil unrest, spare a thought for Stefan Thomas. The German-born programmer who lives in San Francisco is locked out of $277.5m (£203m) worth of bitcoin after forgetting the password to a hard drive.

The drive, which contains the keys to a digital wallet holding 7,002 digital coins of the cryptocurrency, allows 10 attempts at guessing the password before it seizes up and encrypts its contents, losing the hundreds of millions forever. 

Mr Thomas was given the bitcoin in exchange for creating an animated video called ‘What is Bitcoin?’ 10 years ago, but lost the digital keys to the wallet later that year. While each bitcoin was worth $2-$6 at the time, they’re now worth $39,000 each at the time of writing as a result of the currency’s volatile fluctuations. 

Bitcoin is famously volatile, but has made early investors millions of dollars (Photo: Getty)

He has already tried eight of his most commonly-used passwords, leaving him with just two attempts to retrieve the money. “I would just lie in bed and think about it,” he told the New York Times. “Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.” He has since put the IronKey hard drive in a secure facility in part to stop himself overthinking it, adding: “I got to a point where I said to myself, ‘Let it be in the past, just for your own mental health’”. 

Mr Thomas is far from alone. Around 20 per cent of the existing 18.5m bitcoin— currently worth around $146bn — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis, money which may never be recovered. James Howells, an IT worker from Newport who accidentally threw away a hard drive containing even more bitcoin than Mr Thomas (some 7,500 coins, worth $300m) in 2013, is currently offering Newport City Council 25 per cent of the money to let him search its landfill site, which the council says it not possible under…

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