Cyber Security Today, Week in Review for Friday, August 4, 2023

Welcome to Cyber Security Today. This is the Week in Review for the week ending Friday, August 4th, 2023. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com and TechNewsday.com in the U.S.

I’m away this week so we’re re-running my interview with Aaron McIntosh, co author of the Ransomware Task Force’s Blueprint for Ransomware Defence. At a time when successful ransomware attacks appear to be increasing I hope listeners will get a lot from his comments.

Aaron is head of Parachute GTM, which advises small and medium-sized businesses on their go-to-market and product marketing efforts.

Here’s a bit of what he has to say:

“Ransomware actors are re-grouping but they’re able to pivot a lot faster than those who protect networks. They’re changing their tactics and methods at a very quick pace, being enabled by artificial intelligence and machine learning. You’re absolutely going to struggle to keep up. That’s especially true with dated solutions, older kinds of approaches to cybersecurity and older tools. SIEM (system information and event management] and other solutions are very good at telling you certain things but they’re not necessarily good at protecting you against them. Some changes need to be made in the approach to cybersecurity [by organizations].

“I go a step further to say too many businesses aren’t investing in ransomware resilience. It’s not a board priority, it’s an afterthought across a lot of companies. Your listeners are probably doing all the right things, so I don’t want to don’t want anyone to believe that I’m down on the industry as a whole. You’re all doing what you can within the budgets you have available. It’s the role of people like me in the Ransomware Task Force to find ways to simplify that, to provide some tools or make resources available to you that you didn’t have before.”

If you didn’t hear the full interview the first time, now’s a good time to catch up.