On September 16th, FTC hosted Congressman Neal Dunn, FBI Cyber Jacksonville, and seven cyber security experts from our member organizations for a discussion around the needs in the cyber space for both federal and state governments.
What were the panelists?
Panelists included Juan Guerreo-Saade, Principal Threat Researcher at Sentinel One, Darryl Richardson, Chief Platform Evangelist at Aparavi, Chris Usserman, Director of Security Architecture at Infoblox, Ryan Hardenbrook, Regional Enterprise Executive at Elastic, Simon Hill, Vice President of Contract Management at Certes Networks, Greg Porpora, Distinguished Engineer & Distinguished Industry Leader - Government at IBM, and a representative from the FBI's Cyber division. The session was moderated by David Clark - former deputy chief of staff for Governor Ron Desantis.
While our panelists discussed hot topics in the cybersecurity space, notes were taken on an eGlass and displayed to the audience. The notes from this session have been transcribed below.
Enterprise Awareness & Education
Understand the battlespace, limitations, and rules of engagement
We are fighting an asymmetric war
It is essential to keep systems updated
To be defensive, we must begin to think offensively
Systems and data risk mitigation
It is important to understand your data in order to know where the risk is
There is immense risk in duplication of PII
Workforce education and training
There is a shortage of cyber professionals, > 100,000 open positions
We must invest more resources into training, bring people from outside IT, build the workforce
Look outside your market space, incentivize potential employees, and be open to training them
Response to Cyber Emergencies
Not if, but when
Zero Trust: strategy to protect data and mitigate risk
- based on the idea that at some point, someone will get into your network
- strategy is to never trust, always verify, and limit privileges
Everyone should have a viable, actionable plan that is frequently updated
Ransomware is the effect, it is truly a stratified ecosystem of crime. It's important to address the higher problem.
Data, backup, disaster recovery
We are not doing everything we can, one thing that is essential is building up talent
Organizations tend to underestimate the capabilities of malicious hackers
Disaster recovery is only as good as your last backup
Cloud is not necessarily more secure, used for reducing infrastructure
Know what you have and what you don't -> make your data searchable and classifiable
Top 3 vulnerabilities
People
Process (supply chain)
Products
Strategy and Federal Legislation
Defense, active defense, and offense
What strategy should we focus on? Zero trust is a good start
Make sure your house is in order
CISA 2015
Concept of "hacking back"
Cyber resiliency
- We are currently only responsive, we need to be offensive
- Build safeguards (ex. immutable data, separation of networks, preparedness)
- Think offensively
Need more and clearer laws about what can be prosecuted
incidents can take 3-9 months to detect
HR3270 - Active Cyber Defense Certainty Act (ACDC): Good Samaritan Law