Federal report: Hospital cybersecurity is in ‘critical condition’

Many American hospitals and health care practices are critically vulnerable to cyberattack and lack the resources to protect against rising threats, according to a long-awaited report issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Health Care Industry Cybersecurity Task Force. The starkly negative report points to problems beyond hardware and software. The task force, established a year go, is made up of 21 security experts, health care professionals and government officials. “Many organizations cannot afford to retain in-house information security personnel, or designate an information technology (IT) staff member with cybersecurity as a collateral duty,” the task force reported. “These organizations often lack the infrastructure to identify and track threats, the capacity to analyze and translate the threat data they receive into actionable information, and the capability to act on that information.” The talent shortage that hampers cybersecurity in all sectors hits health care especially hard so that the industry leans especially hard on part-time positions or […]

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(ISC)² survey: To recruit cyber talent, feds must make up in training, benefits, what jobs lack in pay

Federal agencies pay an average of $7,000 a year less to cybersecurity personnel than their private sector counterparts, so they need to offer training and other benefits while recruiting more from overlooked groups like women and minorities, according to one of the largest regular surveys of information security workers. The eighth biannual Global Information Security Workforce Study, done by the Center for Cyber Safety and Education and sponsored by contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton, cyber recruiters Alta Associates and the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium or (ISC)², was unveiled Tuesday at (ISC)²’s conference CyberSecureGov in Washington, D.C. The U.S. government “must enhance its benefits … to attract future hires and retain existing personnel given its fierce competition with the private sector for skilled workers and the unprecedented demand,” said Dan Waddell, (ISC)² managing director, North America. “Unfortunately,” he added, “the layers of complexity involved in fulfilling that goal are significant.” “Thanks to the record-number of federal GISWS […]

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University of Maryland, Baltimore County wins national cybersecurity championships

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County won the 2017 National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition over the weekend, beating out nine other teams in the final round from universities based across the country, including the renown Rochester Institute of Technology. Students competed against one another last week in San Antonio, Texas, in a constructed digital battlefield where each team was scored on their ability to defend a network infrastructure that was designed to mirror systems currently used in the commercial sector. Competitors were tasked with guarding the model network, which included point-of-sale and inventory technologies, while ensuring that it remained useable and reliable for end users. An in-house red team of ethical hackers employed by the event’s sponsors played the part of attacker, launching a range of different cyberattacks at the students. Over the last several years, a series of separate challenges have also been added to the competition to specifically […]

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Inside the NSA’s CDX, a high-tech competition pitting cadets against elite attackers

Professional hackers from the NSA, U.S. Cyber Command and foreign militaries are launching a barrage of simulated cyberattacks this week as part of a training exercise to help teach students at the service academies for the Navy, Army, Coast Guard, U.S. Merchant Marine and Canadian Royal Military how to better defend sensitive computer networks. The annual NSA-led event, named the Cybersecurity Defense Exercise, or CDX, brings together rising talent with seasoned cyber-warriors in a simulated war games environment, where the undergraduates must monitor, identify and ultimately defend against a wide array of remote computer intrusions. The intrusions themselves are engineered with open-source, commercially available exploits and other hacking tools. “We don’t use anything homegrown,” said CDX Technical Lead James Titcomb, a full-time NSA employee in the spy agency’s information assurance directorate. “We don’t hit them with anything on the level of a nation-state,” Titcomb said. “The idea is that they should […]

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Inside the NSA’s CDX, a high-tech competition pitting cadets against elite attackers

Professional hackers from the NSA, U.S. Cyber Command and foreign militaries are launching a barrage of simulated cyberattacks this week as part of a training exercise to help teach students at the service academies for the Navy, Army, Coast Guard, U.S. Merchant Marine and Canadian Royal Military how to better defend sensitive computer networks. The annual NSA-led event, named the Cybersecurity Defense Exercise, or CDX, brings together rising talent with seasoned cyber-warriors in a simulated war games environment, where the undergraduates must monitor, identify and ultimately defend against a wide array of remote computer intrusions. The intrusions themselves are engineered with open-source, commercially available exploits and other hacking tools. “We don’t use anything homegrown,” said CDX Technical Lead James Titcomb, a full-time NSA employee in the spy agency’s information assurance directorate. “We don’t hit them with anything on the level of a nation-state,” Titcomb said. “The idea is that they should […]

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How do I get my employees to stop clicking on everything?

If you’ve been given responsibility for network security in a non-technical area of the business, there’s one eternal question that has been bedeviling. How do you get your employees to stop clicking on everything?

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How do I get my employees to stop clicking on everything?

If you’ve been given responsibility for network security in a non-technical area of the business, there’s one eternal question that has been bedeviling. How do you get your employees to stop clicking on everything?

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