Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Michael Melore
Why Encryption Is the Cornerstone of Your Cloud Security
While cloud computing is far from a magic bullet for all your data storage and security woes, organizations are enjoying meaningful benefits in the form of cost-efficiency, on-demand scalability, heavy upfront capital shifted to recurring operational expenses, augmented resources and skills now at their fingertips, and more.
Cybersecurity Muscle Memory: Drilling for a Tight Incident Response
You are likely familiar with what to do and not do in the event of a fire, tornado, disaster recovery, business continuity and other crisis situations. Such preparation may be mandated with oversight. You may even conduct regular exercises to validate your readiness and improve your incident response. Those in the military frequently train to the extent that completion of a task is a matter of triggering muscle memory — an automatic reflex. How developed is your cybersecurity muscle memory?
Collaboration Among Security Vendors Is the Threat Management Solution of the Future
Cyberattackers are getting stronger by the day and collaborating among themselves to come up with new attacks by the minute. They share information about their intended victims, including user IDs, passwords, personal information, social circles and other intelligence. Given the complexity of the average customer security environment, it is more important than ever for security vendors to collaborate to address this challenge.
The Future of Cognitive Security Is Now
Many security conversations today are likely to touch upon security intelligence, behavioral anomaly detection and the value of augmented intelligence (AI) in security. But is cognitive security all hype, or are there real applications in use today? Is it feasible only for the largest, most sophisticated organizations, or is it more widely available?
Strengthening Cybersecurity's Weakest Links With Deep Network Insights
Like a chain forged of steel, cybersecurity is only as strong as its weakest link. But how can we gain visibility into where these weaknesses exist and how they are being exploited? How can we determine where gaps occur that impact our ability to protect against, detect and respond to the latest threats? Studies have shown the vast majority of cyberattacks take place using our networks — which isn’t surprising in our hyperconnected world.
Great Expectations: Building a Winning Cybersecurity Franchise With a Security Operations Center
As a die-hard hockey fan and coach, I often like to think of things in terms in sports. When you think about it, cybersecurity teams and professional sports teams aren’t all that different. If you are a fan of a professional sports franchise, you are well-aware of your expectations for your favorite team every year. Without question, you make an emotional investment at the start of the season, cheering your team on to combat the opposition on a nightly or weekly basis.
Too Many Organizations Don't Have a Plan to Respond to Incidents
When a cyberattack occurs, most organizations are unprepared and do not have a consistent incident response plan. That’s the major takeaway from our third annual “Cyber Resilient Organization” study, conducted by the Ponemon Institute. The study revealed that 77 percent of respondents still lack a formal cybersecurity incident response plan (CSIRP) that is applied consistently across the organization, a figure that is largely unchanged from the previous year’s study.
Why You Need Collaborative Defense in Depth
We are living in a new security reality. Cybercriminals are increasing both their collaborative efforts and the sophistication of their attacks. Meanwhile, those who defend against them remain siloed and under-resourced. Currently, 80 percent of cyberattacks are driven by highly funded, collaborative cybercriminal groups who are sharing knowledge about targets and vulnerabilities.
IBM Identity Study Shows Security May Be Financial Services Firms' Best Defense Against Disruption
“The currency of the new economy is trust.” — Trust researcher Rachel Botsman, TED 2012 Between years of stepped-up regulatory oversight, low interest rates, identity theft and competition from everything from cryptocurrency to crowdfunding, the historically stable and conservative financial services industry has recently become a cauldron of instability. But banks and other financial institutions do have one asset in their favor that upstart competitors can’t match: customer trust.
Where Is Your Sensitive Information and Where Is It Going?
Who is responsible for determining who can access sensitive information? Is it the role of the database or system administrator, or the data owners from lines of business (LOBs)? Maybe the permission oversight varies when data content includes sensitive information. Should your privileged users and admins have actual access to the content? If so, how much control to you have over preventing bad behavior?
What You Should Know Before You Put Your GDPR Program in Motion
At last, it’s time to flip the switch. In our three most recent blog posts in this series, we’ve been leading up to this moment, discussing everything from assessing your current GDPR readiness situation and designing your approach to transforming your organization’s practices. And now we’re ready to talk about the Operationalize phase of the IBM Security GDPR framework. If the prospect of putting all the gears in motion makes you a little apprehensive, you can rest assured you’re not alone.
In 2018, Data Security Is No Longer an Underdog
Underdogs are on everyone’s mind these days, especially with so many winter sporting events just around the corner. Rooting for unexpected or undervalued players and seeing them come out on top is a satisfying, exhilarating experience that can lead us to adopt new perspectives and a greater sense of optimism and possibility. In the enterprise security world, data security has traditionally been viewed as an underdog.
Top Four Challenges That Can Create Tough Sledding for Your Data Security and Compliance Program
Running a data security program can be an overwhelming and, at times, a thankless job. With one foot in the security world and the other in the database world managing the sources that hold sensitive information, database administrators (DBAs) are under constant pressure to: Join the Feb. 15 webinar: Enriched Agility, Retention and Insights with IBM Security Guardium Big Data Intelligence We have examined these responsibilities and identified the most significant challenges DBAs are facing.
IBM Study: Consumers Weigh in on Biometrics, Authentication and the Future of Identity
The technology and security headlines of 2017 foreshadow big changes on the horizon in the world of identity and access. Rumors of the death of the password may have been exaggerated in the past, but major data breaches have removed any doubt that our email addresses, passwords and personal information, including Social Security numbers, are no longer sufficient to protect our identities online.
All Cybersecurity Investments Are Not Created Equal
Cybersecurity risks are growing, with companies experiencing more security incidents and suffering greater losses per incident. In response, organizations are investing heavily in security tools. But are they investing wisely? Recent research suggests that security spending is not as effective as it could be. Many organizations are spending heavily on traditional security tools, such as endpoint defenses, at a rate that exceeds the value of these expenditures.
Secure and Seamless? Building Great Consumer Experiences With Silent IAM
Line-of-business (LOB) managers understand the importance of creating simple and positive digital experiences for consumers. Making it easy to do business with your company helps build loyalty and drives sales. In the identity and access management (IAM) space, this means facilitating user onboarding and logins from any device anywhere — and keeping those processes as smooth and simple as possible, free of stepped-up authentication requirements such as one-time passwords (OTPs).
The Risk Modeling Gotcha: Roles Are Like Hammers to Screws
Why do organizations continue to struggle with entitlement risk modeling? It boils down to risk being aligned to roles and role-based access. The irony is that roles were never intended to be risk models. They were once low-hanging fruit, a logical way to provide an early means of grouping users to entitlements and later associating risk to such groupings. Let’s briefly step back and distinguish the difference between groups and roles.
Meeting Identity and Access Management Challenges
Organizations are flocking to cloud services and mobile devices to cut costs and boost productivity. Despite the benefits, these technologies exacerbate the challenge of verifying identities and managing access to applications and data by consumers, employees and business partners from multiple devices and locations. Let’s take a look at some of the most common identity and access management (IAM) challenges and how organizations can resolve them without compromising employee productivity.
The High ROI of Cyberweapons: Five Factors Driving the Rise in Threats
When you look at the payoff calculus of cyberweapons, it is no surprise that business is booming. Compared with conventional weapons, cyberweapons have a low barrier to entry and a low-risk, low-cost, high-reward payoff calculus that is attractive to malicious actors. The high return on investment (ROI) of cyberweapons is contributing to a rise in threats across the technology landscape. Here is a look at five major factors behind this influx.
Don't Leave Your Keys in the Ignition — Safeguard High-Value Data With Privileged Access Management
User access credentials are prime targets for cyberthieves. Phishing and other social engineering attacks are all about obtaining access, and the advice you read about strong passwords and two-factor authentication is all about preventing bad actors from gaining access to your organization’s network. But all user access is not created equal. What attackers really want is privileged access, such as administrator status.
In Case of Emergency, Break Glass: Protecting User Credentials in the Event of a Data Breach
There have been countless cyberbreaches over the past few years in which personal data, such as user IDs and passwords, have been compromised. These range from attacks against government agencies, such as two recent incidents affecting the national identity systems in Spain and Estonia, to corporate breaches exposing data belonging to millions of customers. In the aftermath of many of these incidents, affected organizations have been forced to prompt their customers to change their passwords.
Drowning in a Sea of Passwords? It's Time to Adopt a Password Manager
If you find yourself sinking in a sea of different passwords for different accounts, struggling to remember your login credentials and spending more time resetting passwords than actually using your accounts, it may be time to consider adopting a password manager. The best practice is to create separate and inconsistent passwords for each of your accounts. That way, should a password be compromised, it can’t be reused to access your other accounts.
Designing Your GDPR Plan: It's Time to Move From 'What' to 'How'
Now that Adam Nelson has walked you through the Assess phase of the IBM Security General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) framework in our previous blog post, I’m here to talk about what comes next: the Design phase. Because if the Assess phase represents the concept of what you need to do, the Design phase is where you need to determine how you’re going to do it.
Why Red on Blue Is a Crucial Component of Cyber Skills and Incident Response Training
More and more companies are looking to cyber exercises and capture the flag events to improve their incident response effectiveness, upskill staff and tackle the cybersecurity talent gap. A red on blue experience provides a safe sandbox environment for participating companies to stress test their business processes and challenge their capabilities in responding to real-world cyber incidents through a realistic simulation.
Why Do Some Identity Governance Strategies Fail?
Identity governance comes along after organizations have already begun implementing identity and access management (IAM) tools and processes. Because it comes later in the IAM project, you are forced to organize and establish a new order to a working environment. It also means you will have to pull some people out of their comfort zone to create a better process for the company. This may be a challenge, and the disconnect can lead to project failures.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Michael
Contact Michael, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack