Talking to the Board About the New Realities of IT Security

With the sudden shift of the global workforce from in-office to remote, IT teams quickly transformed their operations to accommodate the new realities of business — including large-scale adoption of work-from-home technologies, heightened activity on customer-facing networks, and greater use of online services. While these examples of agility allowed business to continue, they also greatly increased the risk of misconfigurations and cyberthreats. Now, it's looking like they could be here to say for a while. On top of that, bad actors have wasted no time trying to exploit new vulnerabilities. In the past several weeks, we've seen ransomware attacks affect several major organizations. These attacks come on the tail of a surge of attacks across the board brought on during the pandemic, as hackers scanned and took advantage of new workloads, and vulnerable VPN connections and misconfigurations left the gates to the network open. When attacks like these make headlines, panicked board members have one question for CISOs: how can we be sure that won’t happen to us? Drawing from nearly 25 years of experience in the security industry, Jeff Costlow, CISO at ExtraHop, will share his top strategies for CISOs to lead board-level conversations about risk management amidst the stark new realities of IT.