Identity is Security: Trust No One

Hackers, hackers and more hackers. It’s a word that often comes cushioned with a lot of negativity. Sometimes, hackers are a force for good, as evidenced by the story of a Russian hacker breaking into routers to patch them. That’s the type of opportunistic good that exists in cybersecurity, despite the hair on fire outlook we are often fed.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still keep our guards up. Taking a look at breaches this week, Facebook is still sweeping headlines as they revised the number of accounts from 50 million to 30 million. They are also working to clarify who is responsible, and for now, they are looking at spammers as the culprit.

In other breach news this week: the blogging site Tumblr was found to have a bug exposing user account information, a water utility company in North Carolina was hit by ransomware and 35 million U.S. voter records were found for sale on a hacking forum.

With so much data exposed, can we ever reel it back in? Today’s businesses collect a huge amount of data on everything they touch, and in the age of GDPR and other privacy regulations, they assume responsibility for that data. The right to be forgotten has become a critical component in the movement for personal control over our data. As the breaches (or near-breaches) above remind us, we each need to take a vested interest in keeping a close watch over our own personal data, as the unfortunate reality is that the number of breaches will only continue to creep up.

This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, focus in the news centers on increasing the talent pool in cybersecurity. The UK has been on the forefront of the effort to recruit and retain talent, and this week, the people behind their Cyber Security Challenge launched a new conference called Cyber Re:coded to connect companies with potential hires.

With that, we leave you with some words from our CTO and CISO Darran Rolls. He spoke about zero-trust security, and in this day and age, that’s a security model we should all be striving for. Listen to the full podcast below, and let us know what you’re reading this week!