I have presented at several cybersecurity conferences over the last few weeks and have had an opportunity to listen to and talk with some of the most highly regarded experts in this field. This includes experts from the FBI, Secret Service, private industry experts and many others.
The message I have heard over and over from all of these people echo these three things that every company must be doing to protect itself right now. To me, this means they qualify as “critical” for companies to be more secure. Obviously, there’s a lot more that companies should do and I’m sure many people have their own thoughts as to what these three may be, but these are the three I have heard over and over:
- Train all employees to recognize and resist falling for phishing emails.
- Use multi-factor authentication.
- Use adequate logging to detect intrusions and unauthorized activity in your network and maintain the logs for an adequate period of time. Statistics show the average time before an intrusion is discovered is 205 days. The logs will be cruicial in any investigation so you need to retain them for at least that long.
UPDATE: After I posted this article on LinkedIn, my friend Jim McConnell who knows more about third-party risk and supply chain risk management than probably anybody else I know, posted the following suggestions for this post. As usual, Jim is spot-on and would like to share Jim’s insights with you:
The post is HERE and I would encourage you to join in the discussion — after all, we are all learning from each other as we go along and conversations like this are a great way to do it!