Because Security Gives Us Freedom.
onShore Security CEO Stel Valavanis spoke with Fox 32’s Tia Ewing to discuss the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, the motivation behind the attack, and what we can and must do in in the future to protect our energy infrastructure.
See the full interview with Stel below.
onShore Security CEO Stel Valavanis recently sat for an interview with Fox 32’s Anthony Ponce and Sally Schulze to discuss Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency feature and how it may affect businesses that use tracking to target their advertising on digital platforms like Facebook.
See the full interview with Stel below.
“As COVID-19 continues to change the way we work, and where we work, businesses are reconsidering decisions made in a crisis mitigation mindset, and planning for the future we now live (and work) in.”
As COVID-19 continues to change the way we work, and where we work, businesses are reconsidering decisions made in a crisis mitigation mindset, and planning for the future we now live (and work) in. At the outset of the pandemic, teams were sent home and often directed to do what they needed to do to stay operational as fully (and quickly) as possible. Leaders had to move quick and make decisions that would impact their organization’s ability to continue to thrive, or even just to survive, and cybersecurity was often not a high priority, if it was considered at all. As it looks increasingly likely that remote working will not be going away, and actually looks to become the “new normal”, organizations are taking a breath, a step back, and looking at some of those decisions with a different eye.
Our company, like many others, did have some apparatus in place for remote working before COVID-19. Many members of the onShore team worked from home for at least a portion of their time. The preparation and planning that allowed our staff to be able to work from home securely paid off in a big way when we, as many companies did, made the transition to remote work quickly, and without much warning.
As many offices do, onShore uses an online collaboration tool to work together, and this has proven invaluable during the pandemic. Our choice to use RocketChat was influenced in no small part by our security concerns, and we have found that working and living in the software has not only allowed us to maintain our high security standards, it’s actually increased our base level of security, through no additional effort or expense on our part.
One of the reasons we choose open source software like RocketChat is that we could host and run the software on premise, meaning on our own servers. As a cybersecurity company, we know that one of the biggest vectors for damaging cybercrime are third party vendors. The cloud, as they say, is just someone else’s computer. When one gives up hosting, akin to physical possession, they also give up control and awareness of the security of the data they store in the cloud. When this data makes up a large part of the private communication of an organization, giving up possession should not be taken lightly.
One reason organizations may be deterred from an on-premise solution is a perceived cost or operational difficulty inherent to doing so. However, RocketChat and other open source solutions often come with all the support of their higher priced alternatives, and the community support is unrivaled. Professional, first party support and management can typically be retained, as a service, much like they can be for non-open source software, or disregarded (if unneeded).
Living in an online collaboration tool reduces the inevitable (though often unintentional) skirting of cybersecurity and compliance policy. As employees are one of the other biggest vectors for cybercrime, encouraging and enforcing adherence to policy is more important now than ever, but can surprisingly be easier to do under WFH conditions. Without physical proximity, for example, it actually becomes more cumbersome for employees to communicate with each other out-of-band, and thus less likely to occur.
As 2020 draws to a close, businesses and organizations will continue to live with choices they made in the haste of the early pandemic. Those choices allowed them to survive 2020, but may not be right for the changed environment that will exist through 2021. If your organization is using online collaboration tools, it’s time to consider how they serve you and how you might be better served now that you have the space to examine the best options available.
To hear more about how onShore Security uses RocketChat to ensure the security of our online communication, please see our webinar, “The Overlooked Risks of Online Collaboration”.
“As long as there exists the false perception that ransomware can be waved away quickly by paying criminals’ demands, there will be organizations that see it as their best practice. In order to defeat it as a threat, the entire cybersecurity world, and the business world at large, must stand together and declare their complete unwillingness to negotiate with criminals.”
I’m beginning to think we should ban ransom payments to criminals or at least disallow insurance to cover them. I know that sounds extreme, but hear me out. It’s very worth exploring at this time, as the scope of the problem is exponentially growing in the wake of COVID-19. According to a new report by Emisoft, ransomware demand costs could reach new highs this year exceeding $1.4B in the U.S. in 2020. [Read more…]