Mark Lobel of Price Waterhouse Coopers: Update on Recent Information Security Trends
Mark Lobel is a nationally known expert in information security who leads the PriceWaterhouseCoopers annual survey of Information Security trends. This podcast summarizes his latest findings regarding changing threats, convergence of security functions, and why despite a decrease in certain attacks many organizations are unable to know what is happening on their networks. He also discusses the importance of benchmarking and the components of effective metrics and benchmarking programs.
The importance of actionable information and use of Security Information Management systems
Changes in information security convergence and its return to an IT focus
What factors predict fewer breaches and lower downtime
Why many firms admit they really don't know what is occurring on their networksPodcast Excerpt:
We haven't won the war yet. You know, when you look at just some of the numbers and metrics that we got, some of the base things have actually improved. Extortion, theft, fraud, intellectual property theft specifically, financial losses, those numbers are all down year over year. Which to us is the function's maturing. A lot of tools have been deployed. They're operating effectively to a degree. But the flip side or converse of that when you ask people what are the breaches and what are actually happening, the number who finally came out and said, 'I don't know,' that number shot way up this year. We had significant advantages and increases in the numbers, so while the things that they can track and measure have gone down, there's an acknowledgement finally of we don't know what we don't know yet. So, that tells us, kind of like a teenager, there's some great maturity there. There's still a lot of immaturity and opportunities for improvement.