I recently had the opportunity to visit an amazing new facility—the Cyber Range at Tech Data—and got to meet the truly exceptional people who make it happen. The facility has many purposes, stemming from the powerful sense of mission that drives the staff.

Every government organization has been the victim of a cybersecurity incident. These can range from mundane incidents such as a user leaving their desk without locking their screen, up to a major breach such as the OPM hack in which hackers stole comprehensive and confidential information on millions of government employees and contractors.

Cell phones, tablets, wearables, and other mobile devices dominate our lives. I personally bring my trusty iPad to everywhere, and, like everyone else, have my phone with me at all times. The biggest attack surface for any enterprise, then, may well be these devices. How can we assess the threats? What are the components in need of protection? What are some key methods of protecting them?

Earlier this month, I wrote about the Zero Trust model for security. As I proceed through these daily blogs, I find many of them complement the ZT model; data security is one. Outside the IOT world, the goal of cybersecurity is to protect data. The Zero Trust model recognizes this and focuses on keeping security close to the asset, and portable.

Once upon a time, endpoint security was just a hall monitor: it watched for known bad files identified with a simple signature and sent you an alert when the file was blocked. To be safe, it would scan every machine daily, an intrusive activity that slowed down machines, and sped up the heart rates of affected users and hapless analysts at help desks.

Every security professional knows that the adversary has the advantage. Security professionals have to find every vulnerability (good luck with that) and remediate it, and the enemy only needs to find one vulnerability and exploit it. This asymmetry underlies their economic advantage: finding one vulnerability gives access to a huge number of systems. In addition, for those willing to forego their conscience and risk jail, it is possible to make large sums of money in a short time, even with a minimum of technical expertise.

The rising numbers of data breaches should come as no surprise to federal IT security pros who work every day to ensure agency information is secure. However, these breaches may not be something a federal IT team can prevent on its own.

DLT partner, Symantec, has put together a list of seven items you must add to any incident response plan. Here’s how it translates to government agencies.

1. Have a Workable Plan

Federal IT pros are facing “Herculean tasks” when it comes to security challenges, a new survey conducted by DLT partner, SolarWinds, reveals.

Open source application development and delivery tools provide compelling value for developers and often fill holes that commercial tools, with their relatively fixed function set, can’t fill. But a new report from Forrester, suggests that open source tools can’t do it all.

After surveying 150 U.S. application development and IT professionals, Forrester found that open source tools play an important role in the software delivery pipeline, they aren’t a silver bullet.