As organizations march into the digital age, data sprawl is accelerating. Information of all kinds is stored everywhere, accessed by multiple people many times a day and shared across corporate and international boundaries. Most organizations do not have a handle on data locations, ownership and flows outside of regulated or compliance-related information. T

When things go wrong with computer systems and networks, whether due to ordinary mishaps or malicious actors, the organizations that rely on those systems and networks are put at risk. They may suffer direct financial losses, reputational damage or both, with effects ranging from inconvenience to total loss and liquidation of the enterprise. Understanding th

When I think about my family vacations from childhood, I remember camping trips, hours on the beach, sharing stories around the campfire and the fun my siblings and I used to have in the back seat of the car — jumping on each other, switching seats and hopping from the third row into the front seat. Half the fun was enabled by the fact that we had no seat be

Risk management is the process of identifying, assessing and controlling threats to an organization. It is also a way to increase the security maturity of an organization. Risk management allows you to think about security more strategically and answer the questions that come from your company board, such as: How many times was the organization attacked? Is

When confronted with the daunting task of developing a cybersecurity strategy, many people don’t know where to start. The quick answer is to make a list of the tasks required to accomplish the project, organize them by functional categories and determine what resources need to be brought together to accomplish the tasks on the list. This might seem lik

What makes a good cyber risk advisor? What skills do they need to help board directors address cybersecurity? According to a report by BayDynamics, board directors “may not be experts in security, but they do know how to steer a business away from risk and toward profit by listening to subject matter experts. However, they expect those experts to frame

This season’s featured cybersecurity nightmare may be ransomware, but breaches of all kinds are going up in both numbers and cost. In response, security vendors are offering sophisticated — and costly — solutions to defend against evermore sophisticated attackers. However, the most effective protective measures have nothing to do with specific software

According to a recent Forrester report, enterprise cloud computing adoption accelerated in 2016 and will do so again in 2017. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) remains the largest portion of the public cloud market, with global spending expected to reach $105 billion in 2017 and $155 billion by 2020. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (

Companies need to do more than just scan for known problems and provide huge vulnerability reports to system and network administrators for remediation. According to Gartner, known vulnerabilities still comprise 99 percent of all known exploit traffic. Furthermore, malware, ransomware and exploit kits target vulnerabilities that are six months or older on av

The very term Internet of Things (IoT) can sound like the buzziest of buzzwords. We all know we need to be aware of and plan for it, but sifting through all the security guidance about the IoT can be overwhelming. Moving Beyond Buzzwords To help cut through the noise, IBM released a new report, “Smart Things Call for Smart Risk Management,” detai

With all the industry studies, articles and literature related to insider threats, it is baffling to see that very few have focused on how insider threats are acquired — in fact, paid for — during a merger and acquisition process. Organizations are so fixated on driving profits and staying competitive that they gobble up any tangible asset they can. Compani

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” — Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Board directors are under pressure to demonstr

The Moody Blues searched for the “Lost Chord,” Captain Kirk searched for Spock and the “In Search Of” television show sought to solve unexplained mysteries. Similarly, IT and security professionals are always searching for solutions that can balance myriad standards and regulations against a continuously evolving threat landscape. A

Disposability has become a regular thing in our lives; but you may have taken for granted the value it brings. Cost, convenience and risk are the cornerstones of successful disposability. Disposable computing offers a solution to cyber security and provides you with valuable threat information. This is the first in our two-part series on disposable computi

While the origin of the recent WannaCry exploit is still under investigation, there is no doubt that humans remain the weakest link in the chain of defense against cyberattacks. According to the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, human factors play a major role in various types of attacks. While it’s easy to blame users, many overlook the fact th