We attended the quarterly FBI briefing on Thursday, 3/14 at the Fed in Chicago. Speakers addressed several topics, among them the escalating use of drones and, of course, your favorite topic and mine…Cybersecurity. Our speaker comes from a very large organization with hundreds of locations across the US. His experience is both wide-ranging and deep. Common themes were the following:

• Everyday is a new “adventure” in discovering what new attempts have been made against your environment. I loved the story of the manufacturing robot which had been hacked and the adventurous attacker was making the machine function on it’s own, or so it would appear from the persons manning that machine. The robot seemed to have a mind of it’s own!
• Everyone will fall into two camps: those who’be been hacked and those who are going to be hacked. In a recent article, I read that pen testing (penetration testing) is not done to the extent it might be due to cost to the organization because someone attempting to get in will just keep trying and trying and trying…until they succeed.
• CISO’s (Chief Information Security Officers) are in a very 24/7/365 role and it isn’t an easy existence. Holidays seems to be the prime days for attempts to be executed on the target by the “bad guys”. That doesn’t make for a very restful holiday with family and friends, does it?
• People are still the key element. We say it time and time again but people are the best defense. Well-trained users go a long way towards securing the perimeter.

If you and your organization are feeling like you are not where you want to be and you feel as though the systems or technology might be the reason why, give us a call. All I want to do is talk to start.