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Industry needs to plug IoT security holes or face vertical meltdown

It comes as no surprise that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered increased cyber activity in Europe and the US, with suspected Russian state-backed hackers looking for opportunities to destabilise western economies and critical infrastructures. It’s even prompted US President Biden to recently release a statement outlining the risks and what businesses need to do to try and counter any attack.

As a Sophos Russia-Ukraine cyberattack page claims, this is all sound advice but the fear is that despite years of guidance and warnings, so many businesses still come up short on security. As Sophos reveals, “every day we assist companies who have only protected some of their assets, keep few if any, logs, are months if not years out of date on patching their systems and have open remote access to the internet with single-factor authentication.”

While for many enterprises this is fixable, there are growing fears that for many verticals it represents a more complex challenge, particularly with the internet of things (IoT). With vertical industries expected to spend over $188 billion on IoT devices and services this year, the prospect of cyber breaches and disruption to industry is very real.

According to a PSA Certified 2022 Security Report, there are significant gaps in IoT security provision, with technology decision-makers citing a lack of internal expertise and cost as inhibiting them from implementing stronger security. Only 31% of technology decision-makers feel ‘very satisfied’ with their level of security expertise in-house, while 59% still admit that internal validation is relied upon to certify security implementations.

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Rip it up and start again? Why does cybersecurity appear to be failing?

“Personally, I want to say I am sorry that this happened,” wrote Charles Brown, president and CEO of Canadian healthcare testing and diagnostics company LifeLabs. Brown was writing an open letter following a breach of the company’s IT systems and potential loss of records impacting 15 million customers. It’s the latest in a sorry line of breaches and yet over the past 18 months enterprises have had access to more sophisticated security tools and apps than ever before, so what is wrong? Why does cybersecurity seem to be failing?

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Tanium CEO leads from the front as company plans 60% growth

“Grand but not great,” reads an old Washington Post review of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington DC’s Penn Quarter. The same can not be said for Orion Hindawi, CEO of security software company Tanium. If anything, the opposite is true. Sat in the vacuous Cabinet dining room in the bowels of the Hyatt hotel, Hindawi is clearly not a show boater. He has a calm, workmanlike manner. He’s not a salesman. He’s an engineer first and comes across as one of those captains you often hear about in sport, the ones who roll up their sleeves and lead from the front, not necessarily by what they say, the posturing or the cheesy one-liners, but by what they do.

A year ago, that came to the fore when he had to write a blog rebuffing stories in the press, such as the one on Bloomberg that claimed employee unrest and an executive exodus. Hindawi says the employees “didn’t recognize themselves in the articles,” but what it did do was galvanize the firm into “putting in as many belts and suspenders to make sure that what was said was never actually going to be true about Tanium.”

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