Tag: cyber executives
DragonForce Ransomware Hits Saudi Firm, 6TB of Data Leaked – February 27th
A Riyadh-based real estate and construction company has fallen victim to a ransomware attack by DragonForce, resulting in the theft of 6TB of sensitive data. The attackers initially set a February 27 ransom deadline, one day before the start of Ramadan, but upon non-compliance, published the stolen data on a dedicated leak site (DLS). DragonForce operates as a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) group, equipping cybercriminals with attack tools in exchange for a share of ransom payments. Their leak platform also employs advanced CAPTCHA mechanisms to evade security firms.
Companies worldwide continue to sideline CISOs
Organizations worldwide are continuing to put cybersecurity on the back burner, with only two percent having implemented cyber-resilience in all areas surveyed, says business consulting giant PwC. According to the latest PwC report, Bridging the gaps to cyber resilience: The C-suite playbook: “Fewer than half of the executives say their CISOs are involved to a large extent in strategic planning, board reporting, and overseeing tech deployments.” C-suite executives and their CEOs are currently paying growing lip-service to cybersecurity in an effort ensure their compliance with the growing body of cyber legislation on both sides of the Atlantic. But, according to PwC, only 15 percent are actually measuring the potential financial impact of cyber risks to a significant extent.
Closing the chasm between cyber and CEOs
Risk is the common language that will close the knowledge and credibility chasm that frequently separates chief information security officers (CISOs) from their boards. Even in large organisations, the CISO is rarely awarded the authority granted automatically to the chief financial officer (CFO) and some other c-suite executives. But this is already starting to change as new laws on both sides of the Atlantic are making not only CISOs but also chief executive officers (CEOs) responsible by law for significant but essentially preventable cyber-breaches. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last year is known to have notified the CFO and the CISO of SolarWinds about potential enforcement actions related to the 2020 cyberattack against the company’s Orion software platform, which the company had disclosed in a regulatory filing with the agency. This was further compounded when in October, the SEC finally charged SolarWinds and its CISO Timothy Brown with fraud and internal control failures for allegedly misleading investors about its cybersecurity practices leading up to the Sunburst attack discovered in December 2020.
Gulf of misunderstanding between CEOs and CISOs widens
There is a widening gulf of miscommunication between security teams and their boards. According to software intelligence platform, Dynatrace, 77 percent of company information security officers (CISOs) say their boards and CEOs focus too heavily on the ability to react to security incidents and not enough on reducing and preventing risk proactively. “Executive engagement has often been limited to conversations around regulatory compliance and high profile or user-centric security risks, such as phishing attacks, ransomware, or the use of mobile devices among an increasingly hybrid workforce. There is often less understanding of the material operational effects created by other, more technology-centric risks, such as gaps in the organization’s application security posture,” says Dynatrace.