Technically Speaking

Every year, there are more and more security breaches, and it gets harder and harder to spot them. According to a leading cybersecurity vendor1, it takes almost seven months for organizations to find breaches, which gives malicious attackers plenty of time to get what they want. Most often, system misconfigurations like default settings or credentials leave the door wide open for exploitation, resulting in these breaches. As organizations grow, this problem only gets worse because quick changes frequently result in skipped steps.

Security is paramount in the digital age, especially when it comes to keeping networks secure. Having network security monitoring services stand between your organization and malicious attackers is crucial. Still, the volume of alerts and issues that come with them can easily overwhelm your team. The volume of these alerts is rising every year too. According to a report by TrendMicro, 54% of teams surveyed felt like they were drowning in alerts, and 27% said they spent most of their time dealing with false positives.

The U.S. electric grid is critical infrastructure consisting of an ecosystem of communities, stakeholders, governments and economies. Most of the grid infrastructure was built decades ago and is unreliable. Bad actors know it. In 2015, Russian hackers carried out the first successful cyberattack on the nation's electricity grid, which was just one of an ongoing series of security breaches and attacks on US infrastructure and utilities.

Implementing zero trust may seem daunting, but it is also an opportunity to integrate more secure coding practices into your software applications from the start. Zero-trust security assumes that all traffic on your internal network is potentially malicious. Consequently, it requires taking measures to:

Government organizations have a bad rap for being inefficient. But with outdated technology and limited spending, they aren’t exactly set up for success. And the expectations from stakeholders are high, with funding provided primarily by taxpayer dollars.

As government agencies and organizations look to modernize their technology stacks to keep up with changes in the workforce, aging solutions, and closing contracts, they’ll all set out with a similar process: submit an RFP, review submissions, and choose a vendor. Seems simple enough. But what government CIOs often don’t realize is that requiring proven, specific use cases may be limiting what their new (and likely expensive) technology investment can do for their organization. Here’s what I mean.