CISO Stressed Episode 4: SCYTHE Chief of Staff Elizabeth Wharton interviews Dr. Pablo Breuer.

On this episode of CISO STRESSED, SCYTHE Chief of Staff Elizabeth Wharton interviews Dr. Pablo Breuer. Breuer is currently a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center and the CISO of Security BSides Las Vegas. They discuss what to change in a team’s response plan after a ransomware attack, ransomware and malware attacks going undetected for months at a time, and his response to stress and building better plans.

KEY TAKEAWAYS 

The military is more likely to plan out a few years in advance, and commercial companies normally only plan as far as one fiscal year ahead of time.   There is something to be learned from both the private and the public sector.   
Get back to basics. Solarwinds could have been prevented from ever reaching a supply chain attack if people didn't’ gloss over the basics: Interns shouldn’t be allowed to do things that are public facing without a mentors supervision  
Attacks are going to happen: It’s the nature of the beast, and there’s too much incentive.  
Companies need to evaluate what risk they are currently accepting, if that risk is acceptable, and if not how do they get down to residual risk that is.  
Depending on who’s map you follow, at the end of 2020 we had between fifteen or twenty times the number of devices on the internet than we had people on the planet.  
A CISO is essentially a risk advisor, advising company risk. They don’t get to decide what’s acceptable, the company decides what risk is acceptable.