2018 marks the 15^th year of the National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a government/industry effort – observed every October – that works to ensure every American has the resources they need to “be safer and more secure online” and educating everyone about the roles they play in helping to safeguard the internet.

From Equifax to Yahoo, WannaCry and Petra, every month seems to bring with it yet another high-profile attack. Vendors roll out patches and fixes, and questions are asked across the political and security communities.

Getting to know the “enemy with no face” is critical to winning the cyber war. In fact, it’s the tagline from the U.S. Army’s latest cyber warrior recruitment ad. Yet, one of the biggest challenges to doing so is that most organizations have zero visibility into a significant percentage of the endpoints on their network. That’s because they are either not managed (BYOD, guest, and IoT), have disabled or broken agents, or aren’t detected by periodic scans.

When you think about smart cities what springs to mind? Perhaps it’s a city app that lets you know the location of available parking spots or a transit company that can automatically re-route buses away from congested areas based on a network of fleet- or city-wide sensors. In reality, the definition of a smart city varies, depending on who you talk to.

Hackers are ruthless in their persistence and fortitude. It can take weeks or months for them to gather intelligence on your IT vulnerabilities, penetrate your network, and exfiltrate your precious data. But they know, and statistics prove this, that, for the most part, their victims have no idea that their network infrastructure is under attack – until it’s too late.

Another month, another regulation deadline to comply with. But this time, it’s defense contractors who are in the hot seat.

To safeguard defense information in non-federal systems and organizations, U.S. defense contractors and soon all federal agencies, must meet the DFARS 7012 mandate and implement all of the requirements of NIST Special Publication 800-171 Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI).

If you’re wondering where to spend your federal fiscal year-end dollars, no doubt cybersecurity is top of mind. With threats increasing and constantly evolving, protecting federal systems, networks, and data has never been more important.

But this year, there’s a new imperative for federal CIOs – the Presidential Executive Order on Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure.

Another nameless, faceless adversary (or as the U.S Army calls them “the enemy with no face”) struck again in the last week of June. Hot on the heels of WannaCry attack in May, the Petya ransomware campaign brought widespread disruption to organizations, government agencies, and infrastructure worldwide.

It’s clear that smart technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT) are the future of our communities. But, is your agency ready for the billions – soon to be trillions – of sensors and devices connected to one another that will transform our society?

The risks of a breach or attack, particularly to vulnerable network endpoints, are worrying and costly.  Impacts include:

We all know that the Internet of Things (IoT) is here. But IT professionals responsible for enterprise communications networks aren’t exactly sure where IoT resides on their networks or whether these devices are secured. Rogue devices are everywhere (although not all are out to steal the blueprints to the Death Star) but according to a survey sponsored by ForeScout Technologies, only 30% are confident that they know what IoT devices are on their network.