Common sense is not always common practice, especially with cybersecurity. Most of the breaches we see today are not because some super cool artificial intelligence firewall failed or because of a brand new zero-day exploit. The data breaches are typical because:
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somebody clicked on a phishing email
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a door was left unlocked
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somebody put a thumb drive in the computer
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a vulnerability wasn’t patched
These are all things that we assume are common sense but we neglect to focus on or to actually make sure that they are common practice.
We need to do a better job focusing on the basics in cybersecurity. Assumptions that we have the “basics covered” are erroneous. Examples of basics:
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User Awareness Training
AUTHOR BIO
Christian at Indian Beach, Oregon
Christian Espinosa is Alpine Security’s CEO/Founder and a Cybersecurity Professor at Maryville University. He holds over 25 certifications, including the CISSP, CCISO, and PMP. Christian is a US Air Force veteran with a BS in Engineering from the US Air Force Academy and MBA from Webster University. Christian holds multiple patents on cybersecurity attack and defense. Major recent projects include penetration testing and assessments of commercial aircraft, medical device penetration testing, and numerous incident response projects. When Christian isn’t protecting us from cybercriminals, he climbs mountains, travels the world, teaches outdoor wilderness survival, and competes in Ironman triathlons.
