Up Times
by Bryley · February 2022
A Hundred Thousand Pounds Sixty Hours a Week
How many van lines write on the backs of their trailers something like, ‘our employees are our biggest asset’? Could be true. Trucking is hard and lonely. The hours are long; the accountants under government restrictions calculate drivers’ time to maximize profit in a competitive field. And the hours are mostly passed in monotony. And somehow they’ve got to stay alert. Lives in the tiny cars around them depend on it. They’re responsible for tens of thousands of dollars of machinery and maybe more in cargo. They’ve got to continuously skillfully navigate a forty x ten foot wall at sixty-five miles an hour.
While you may not have a life-and-death-in-the-hands-of-your-employees sort of business like a tractor-trailer line, your employees still protect a lot when your organizations’ data is in their hands. This data may include the company’s projects, banking, databases, contracts, research, records, intellectual property, access in a supply chain and more. And if that data is suddenly inaccessible, how much of your operation – how many of your projects, employees, business functions … just stop?
According to IBM’s 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report, human error is behind nearly twenty-five percent of data breaches: an inattentive employee is a real threat to your business’ systems and data. Help prevent your employees from compromising your data by providing regular Security Awareness Training (SAT) … [5 min. read]
Why an Inspection?
Technology assessments are a smart place to start to make sure your organization’s infrastructure continues to run smoothly.
And just like there are emissions and mechanical inspections for your car, different kinds of assessments reveal different types of gaps:
- Network Assessment is a comprehensive cataloguing of your existing network
- Risk Assessment provides a comprehensive evaluation of information security risks
- Vulnerability Assessments identify vulnerabilities and configuration issues hackers may exploit to penetrate the network
Assessments can help you understand and identify gaps in your organization’s security, compliance and backup … [4 min. read]
Business Continuity Mixtape
Bryley-curated stories from around the internet:
As of September’s data, 2021 was on-pace to be the year with the most US breaches. So what steps can you take to put your business in a better security posture? Here are five key approaches … darkreading.com
Following a US Executive Order the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has authored a new document that spells out minimum recommendations for federal agencies to follow as they acquire software or a product containing software. This will have ramifications for anyone selling products with a software component in the governmental supply chain. At the same time NIST released detailed guidance about IoT device-labeling recommending the establishment of baseline security standards and categorical seals of approval … csoonline.com
Facebook is known to send legitimate emails that should trigger a recipient to ask, ‘this for real?’ If Facebook/Meta is going to send clickable links regarding account security, how can you or your employees be sure you won’t end up on a bad site? … pcmag.com
CMMC is the means to securing the US military supply chain. Registered Provider Organizations (RPOs) are certified to prepare an organization for the rigors of compliance. They also act as an advisor in the CMMC-certification process … cmmcab.org
This recently exploited vulnerability (that affected government agencies, the food industry and the San Francisco 49ers) had a patch available from Microsoft almost a year ago. Said security researcher Matthew Everts: “patching alone isn’t always enough … you also need to check the attackers haven’t left behind a web shell [that can be deployed post-patching] to maintain access. And when it comes to sophisticated social engineering attacks such as those used in email thread hijacking, educating employees about what to look out for and how to report it is critical for detection …” zdnet.com
Note: The Mixtape section is Bryley’s curated list of external stories. Bryley does not take credit for the content of these stories, nor does it endorse or imply an affiliation with the authors or publications in which they appear.
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