Technically Speaking

According to the 2020 Verizon DBIR, (Data Breach Investigations Report) there were 3,950 confirmed breaches in 2020. The onset of the COVID pandemic resulted in a drastic increase in exploitable vulnerabilities, phishing attempts, ransomware campaigns, and remote compromise attempts.

Crises and disasters are unavoidable; especially, from the perspective of information security professionals, whose adage is to "assume you've already been hacked." It would be naïve to assume that any network was impervious to adversarial campaigns. The difference between a cybersecurity novice and a leader isn't whether they can infallibly prevent incidents; rather, the distinction lies in how they respond to crises, mitigate impacts, remediate compromises, and incorporate lessons into their risk assessment, policies, and response plans.

An organization's personnel can be the strongest or weakest element of any security strategy. In times of national crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, tensions can run high, and conventionally manageable stresses can accumulate and degrade focus, performance, and mental bandwidth.

The Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) recently received a much-needed influx of funds, bringing its total to $1 billion.  This money is a small part of the funding for technology upgrades in the government, and a very small part of the overall COVID relief bill of which it was a component. The bill does not indicate how the money is to be spent but for most observers modernization is almost equivalent to cloud adoption, with cybersecurity a close second. While most observers accept that the U.S.

There are two distinct factions when it comes to working from home: those who relish it and those who despise it. Before COVID-19, working from home was a perk. When the pandemic hit, work-from-home (WFH) became a necessity to combat the virus’s spread. One person’s dream; the other’s nightmare. As COVID-19 rolls on, employers are dealing with two sides of a war between those who want to return to the office and those who’d prefer working from home. Depending on who you ask, results are mixed:

In our last article on the GovDevSecOpsHub, we sat down with Peter Archibald, the Regional Sales Manager for DoD and FSI sales at Checkmarx, and Jeff Ingram, a DoD Regional Sales Manager at Checkmarx, to discuss the inclusion of the company’s application security testing (AST) solution in Platform One’s Iron Bank.