Tag: risk management
What Y2K And 9/11 Could Have Taught Us About Managing The WannaCry Cyber Attack
Over the past week, countless organizations around the world were victims of a cyberattack involving WannaCry ransomware. While the EU’s law enforcement agency called the attack “unprecedented,” it was perhaps only unique in scale. In fact, this attack was neither sophisticated nor innovative. It had many precedents and was definitely preventable. For starters, according to numerous security analysts, WannaCry took advantage of a file-sharing vulnerability in Windows that was repurposed using commonly available “Ransomware-as-a-Service” to package the attack and allow it to support multiple languages simultaneously. To make matters worse, Microsoft had actually released a patch for these vulnerabilities in …
It’s Time To Think Of Cybersecurity As A Business Enabler
Last year, CIO, CSO and PricewaterhouseCoopers released a new Global State of Information Security survey, which polled more than 10,000 executives from 127 countries about IT security. The results were a mixed bag, with security incidents up 38% over 2014 but corresponding budgets rising only 24%. The survey reflected broad thinking about how companies are trying to defend themselves from hackers as well as employees, the most often cited sources of security compromises. But despite the continued growth in hacks and other security incidents, there were some important signs that security threats aren’t being taken seriously enough at the executive …
What the G7 must do for internet growth and security
In 2014, researchers from the World Economic Forum and McKinsey & Company projected that as much as $21 trillion in global economic value creation would depend on the robustness of cyber-security over five to seven years. That’s as big as the entire U.S. economy. To discuss the future of the Internet and its risks, IT ministers from the G7 countries and the EU gathered for the first time in 20 years. The information and communications technology (ICT) summit in Takamatsu, Japan, was held against a background of major cyber-security dangers including threats to critical infrastructure and mobile devices as well …
Fail First – Japanese businesses must shed conservative character
Last year’s general election in Japan led to a deluge of coverage by Reuters, Bloomberg, and other foreign news agencies. Since December, I’ve received many inquiries, and gave numerous interviews during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. It is clear that foreign spectators are brimming with interest in Japan, specifically regarding what can be learned in their own countries from the successes and shortcomings of the Abenomics policies for economic growth. Various TV networks in Europe have shown strong interest in the issues directly confronting Japan, such as how to halt deflation and manage the national debt. …
Yahoo Hacks Highlight Cyber Flaws Japan Rushing to Thwart
Shortly after the alert sounded at 9:10 p.m., Yahoo Japan Corp.’s risk team knew it had a problem. More than 20 million usernames and passwords belonging to its customers were being dumped into a file, primed to be stolen. “What the hell are you doing?” the team asked the Yahoo employee whose account was capturing the encrypted data. The download was blocked immediately, Motonobu Koh, a risk manager, recalled in a recent interview. Then the worker replied: “I’m not doing anything. I’m at home.” The April 2013 breach of Yahoo Japan, controlled by billionaire Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Corp., was an …