Equifax Breach Lessons Learned

Equifax Breach Lessons Learned

After reading the Equifax breach report released by U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. This would be a great post to summarize and list out key items that went wrong in the Equifax breach. Hopefully, it will lead to a wake up call for other companies in order to better their own information security. 

Security Representative on the Core team

It’s highly important to have someone that understands information security on your core team. Many times, the task gets pushed to the Legal or IT team core team members. This is one of the reasons that led to the breach. IT operational tasks and security tasks need to fall under a specific leader. Ideally, someone that understand security and not just IT. In Equifax’s case, security was represented by the IT team core member. However, their views were not in line with the security team leader. Therefore, something that may be of risk may not reach the CEO’s level and will get missed. However, Read The Full Post

Cybersecurity for Small Businesses

Cybersecurity for Small Businesses

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has recently created a whole section on cybersecurity awareness for small businesses. It can be viewed here –> https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/small-businesses/cybersecurity.

Best of all, the resources are all free to read and use within your own organization. When I first heard of the FTC doing this, I was glad because many smaller businesses find it difficult to obtain free security resources and expertise. There are a lot of small businesses that either state they have no resources, or they lack the funds for information security and awareness. Well, the posted information by the FTC is a great way for businesses to measure their current security practises.

What will I learn ?

Some of the topics discussed are:

• ransomware
• phishing emails
• cyber insurance
• physical security
• information regarding the NIST framework
• email security 

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When Organizations Do Not Use Email Encryption

When Organizations Do Not Use Email Encryption

For this article, I had originally written it a few months ago. However, I didn’t get the chance to post it at that time. And, in a fortunate and positive way it turns out that my post will be some what less relevant than originally intended for the readers. When I initially had started this article, I had noticed an issue which seems to crop up anytime I am working with an organization. Many important organizations still lack basic security tools and options. In the example of this article, it looks into the lack of use of email encryption and secure email systems.

Now before I get into the nitty gritty stuff I want to list out a disclaimer. Everything I conduct, list, and discuss on my blog is and has always been for educational purposes. None of my articles are made or should be used to attack machines out there. All information on my blog is for the better purpose of learning better security methods.

Disclaimer

Now this article is not meant to bash government organizations in any way what so ever. This article is here to teach that any and all types of organizations can easily lack basic security measures. (more…)