An outside view of cybersecurity ‘inside the Beltway’

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This week on Federal Tech Talk, host John Gilroy spoke with Bill Conner, CEO  of SonicWall.  SonicWall handles a wide variety of advanced cyberattacks and is a well-known brand that most federal IT professionals have familiarity with. Conner will give his end-of-year wrap up on technology issues facing the government.

SonicWall did a cybersecurity study and saw that by mid-year 2020, cyber threats were up 20%.

He began by giving a quick summary of what is going on with the world of Advanced Persistent Threats, or APT.  Conner said there are APT groups that share information on methods and techniques — it sounds like criminals in prison sharing bank robbing methods.  He elucidated upon how new threats have combined into what is called a “malware cocktail.”

A recent DoD leader was quoted as saying that organizations today need to be moved from cybersecurity to resilience. It looks like attacks will be successful; one has to learn to deal with the mess.

One fascinating topic was the idea of ransomware.  Conner confirmed that it is frequently injected into a system through malicious email, or phishing scams. What is new is he indicated that federal agencies have been subjected to ransomware demands.

Conner concludes the interview with commenting on the proliferation of IoT devices and how  IT systems in the future may become IoT dependent.

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