I Really Don’t Like Cybersecurity Awareness Month
I know, I know – I’m the Head of Cybersecurity for our firm. I’m constantly promoting cybersecurity awareness and yet I have such strong negative feelings towards a month dedicated to it?
Here’s how I see it. To me, this “celebration” can be compared to an anniversary, or Valentine’s day. The love for your significant
other shouldn’t only be celebrated on those days, we should celebrate them every day. I’m sure you can hear my wife’s eye roll from here. Let me explain further.
Cybersecurity shouldn’t just be acknowledged one month out of the year; it should be practiced daily. The tips we share, the advice we give, they are all things you should be using on repeat. Put into place as a “healthy habit” similar to brushing your teeth. The best practices don’t work if you only practice them on occasion.
My other concern is that praising the effort one month out of the year will give people a false sense of security. Trust me when I say, hackers aren’t taking the month off because you’ve decided to be extra vigilant in October. They are still there, waiting for when you’ve let your guard down again.
So, what do you do? Treat cybersecurity like your personal security. Locked doors are great but enhanced security of gates/ security systems AND locked doors are better. Multi-Factor Authorization for your accounts is great, but MFA AND a firewall is better.
Going beyond just implementing the additional security, it needs to managed. With security solutions constantly firing out logs and alerts, digging through them to identify real problems and answers, a lot can be missed. This is why we’ve teamed with FireEye for our SIEM (security information and event management) system. Centering our SOC with FireEye‘s industry leading threat intelligence software allows us to double check alerts, validate alerts and gain additional information/context to why and where they are happening. This allows us to act faster and with more precision. Much like the police, if you had additional camera footage to show them for your
personal security.
Again, the acknowledgement for cybersecurity awareness is great, just like the acknowledgement to recognize your spouse (more than once a year) is encouraged! But the harsh reality is, if you don’t implement that awareness daily, you’re missing the mark. For
more information on our SIEM, give us a call!
– A Message from Anne-Marie Lerch, CXO
Download a copy of the OCTOBER 2020 NEWSLETTER
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Related: Solution Feature: Mandiant