Nashville 2021

The FBI will be presenting on cyber threats to Middle Tennessee.  The brief will cover the cyber criminal profile, tools, and tradecraft.  The end of the brief will provide recommendations for how to be safe online in your personal and professional life.

Our digital environments and workforces are more dynamic than ever. To navigate the risks and challenges that digital innovation brings, organizations must rethink their approach to security.  Static, legacy approaches have become redundant against sophisticated, fast-moving threats, and attackers that continue to evolve their techniques. Organizations are increasingly turning to new technologies like AI to achieve much-needed adaptability and resilience; protecting workforces and data from attack by detecting, investigating and responding to cyber-threats in real time — wherever they strike.

Security practitioners understand the need to implement new controls that help their organizations’ defend against the rising number of attacks and Fifth Generation threats like the SolarWinds Orion supply chain hack. But slowed economic growth and the push to secure systems from sophisticated new threats challenges many companies.

These global market conditions underscore the importance of employing a consolidation strategy with a unified security architecture at its center that protects cloud, networks, endpoints, and mobile devices.

Join Grant Asplund, Chief Security Evangelist for Check Point Software Technologies, as he shares the building blocks for putting in place a consolidation strategy that:

• Increases security efficiency with a unified security architecture
• Improves your organization’s overall threat prevention profile
• Eliminates complexity caused by managing disparate systems
• Reduces total cost of ownership

Mobile security is not a new concern, but as mobile devices become the heart of an organization’s IT estate, the stakes are getting higher. Insights from Verizon’s 2021 Mobile Security Index (MSI) Report provides a benchmark for how security leaders are dealing with the rapid modernization of remote working. This year’s MSI report is already reshaping how security leaders tackle the ongoing challenges of malware, phishing, excessive app permissions and inappropriate device usage. The MSI combines insights from a survey of 800+ security professionals with primary and proprietary research data from over a dozen leading security organizations. David Grady, Verizon’s Chief Security Evangelist, walks us through the MSI findings and its NIST CSF-inspired recommendations for mitigating mobile risk.

In 2020, there was an unprecedented growth in ransomware attacks and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. Rather, these attacks are evolving and becoming more harmful as cyber criminals become more organized and effective. It is predicted that in 2021, businesses will fall victim to a ransomware attack every 11 seconds with an estimated cost of over $20 billion – 57 times more than in 2015, making ransomware the fastest growing type of cybercrime.

As a result, companies are transitioning from the traditional “trust but verify” method and implementing a Zero Trust model, requiring all users to be authenticated and continually authorized in order to be granted access and maintain access to company data and applications. By leveraging various technologies & techniques such as multifactor authentication, IAM, least privilege access, and microsegmentation, the Zero Trust model reduces the risk of a ransomware attack and minimizes the potential damage from a breach.

This panel will highlight where enterprises are most vulnerable to becoming a victim of ransomware and how utilizing a Zero Trust model minimizes this risk. Industry experts will discuss best practices to avoid a ransomware attack including adapting the Zero Trust model, what to do if your company is being held for ransom, ways to mitigate the damage caused by an attack, and how to recover afterwards.

Every organization gets compromised – it’s how you fast you detect and respond to an incident that counts. This is especially important when you look at trends like the overnight move to remote work, the rise in encrypted traffic and acceleration of cloud adoption, as well as the proliferation of enterprise IoT that have expanded the attack surface and complicated the job of security professionals. We’ll explore those trends and the opportunity that lay ahead for security teams post-compromise to prevent an event that results in an outage or an incident from becoming a full-scale data breach.

With the Passwordless Decade well underway, more and more organizations are asking the question: Why is now the right time to move beyond passwords?

George Avetisov, CEO of HYPR, will discuss the rise of organizations moving to the cloud, how the perimeter fades and the attack surface gets larger. Modern tools such as SNIPR and Modlishka make it easier for hackers to launch large-scale automated attacks, bringing credential re-use and two-factor-authentication attacks to record highs. 

How did we get here, and will mainstream adoption of passwordless security have an impact? We will explore how the rise of virtual desktop infrastructure and a remote workforce has affected workstation login and review how the evolution of authentication has impacted organizations’ identity and access management systems.

In this session, you’ll learn:

It is important to recognize that, overall, the industry has an effectiveness problem. The escalation in threat activity and the talents shortage in the industry has created a situation where, despite lots of products and cybersecurity spend, we aren’t getting better protection. To put a finer point on it, there are over 3,000 vendors selling products in the industry. The total spend last year was $120B+ and even with all of that there we almost 4,000 breaches — a 96% increase over the previous year.​ The key takeaway from these breaches is that they are NOT product failures.​ They are operational failures. ​To prevent these kinds of breaches from happening again in the future, we believe, the industry needs to adopt a new approach – an operational approach – to cybersecurity. ​

Cloud security is hard, not least because cloud platforms change so quickly.  This talk presents several lessons learned from security teams struggling to get their arms around the sprawl of modern infrastructure, using practical analogies from pandemics and earthquakes.

Authentication is a cornerstone capability of any application. Ensuring a user is who they say they are is crucial to maintaining data privacy and preventing fraud and data breaches. Consequently, improperly implemented authentication, known as broken authentication, is a potentially devastating application vulnerability. In fact, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) lists broken authentication as the second most critical security risk to web applications.

This session will provide:

• An overview of broken authentication;
• Why it’s so dangerous;
• The types of threats that can take advantage of this vulnerability;
• How you can prevent this most critical application security risk.

Over the past few years, the number of organizations that have adopted cloud-based systems has grown exponentially, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In turn, cloud security has become a critical issue for IT security executives and their teams. McAffee reported an increase of 630% in attacks by external actors targeting cloud services between January and April of 2020. This uptick in cloud security breaches is projected to persist even after the pandemic as many companies continue to utilize the cloud and leverage its benefits.

While migrating to the cloud offers numerous advantages, it also poses certain threats and challenges. In a recent report by Oracle & KPMG, over 90% of IT Professionals felt their organization had a cloud security readiness gap. A significant concern for many who are adapting to a cloud-based workforce is misconfigurations and gaps in cloud security programs. Additionally, cloud-based infrastructure requires adopting new security policies and processes. Many companies believe their existing security teams lack the necessary skillsets and knowledge that the cloud environment requires, especially as organizations turn to multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and distributed cloud models.

This panel will highlight the areas where cloud systems can leave enterprises vulnerable, ways to minimize common misconfiguration errors, and other best practices to mitigate threats when migrating to the cloud. Our lineup of Industry Experts will provide their expertise on developing a robust cloud security strategy that addresses these issues and insight on how to stay secure in the future of cloud security.

Over the past year, the tools and tactics of cybercrime and cybersecurity adapted against a backdrop of enormous changes to our lives and businesses.

Join us to learn how cybercrime evolved in 2020, and identify ways to safeguard your organization against what’s out there.

We’ll explore:

• Top threats for businesses and consumers
• Emerging cybercrime trends and tactics
• Solutions you can employ to thwart future attacks

Building a defensible compliance program can be a bit of an art form. Sure, there are frameworks that supply structure to guide you, but — especially when multiple frameworks, policies, or regulations compound each other — the complexity of the various controls and supports can get unruly fast. This presentation will go through the basics of why compliance is necessary, how compliance and risk go hand-in-hand, and the five key steps to build a truly defensible compliance program.

Insider Threat has become increasingly problematic to businesses as the frequency and cost of these threats have risen over the last several years. In a global study conducted by Ponemon Institute in September of 2019, there was a 31% increase in overall cost of Insider Threat and a 47% increase in the total number of Insider Incidents from 2018.

Today, Insider Threat poses an even greater risk to businesses in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Forrester Research, Inc. reported that in 2020, a quarter of all security breaches were caused by an insider and estimates that in 2021, Insider Threats will account for 33% of security breaches.

This panel will discuss the various factors that contribute to this increase in Insider breaches, how remote work has impacted the malicious & non-malicious Insider Threats facing businesses, and the implications this has on enterprises today. Our lineup of Industry Experts will offer their insight & provide best-practices on how businesses and their IT Security Teams should address these risks and adapt in order to defend against Insider Threats.

It is shocking that, year over year, stealing credentials is still the top tactic used by attackers to breach organizations. Why is this still happening? Hint: It isn’t only because of weak passwords. Organizations have invested heavily into privileged access management technologies, but these solutions have struggled to address the problem for five key reasons. In this discussion, we will address the gaps in current access management approaches but, more importantly, show you how to quickly close the gaps and significantly reduce security risks without disrupting your current investments or systems.

Join Remediant in this discussion to:

• learn the four reasons why privileged access management implementations fail;
• identify areas in your IAM program where you can reduce admin access risk; and
• capitalize on existing investments, while improving your risk posture.

Cyberattacks have quadrupled since the beginning of the pandemic. Lots of endpoints are currently on their own when it comes to being managed and protected. What will happen when these machines come back to the office, or are they coming back at all? This presentation will address the different scenarios that companies may encounter and how to resolve them by automating their endpoint management.

Prior to defending an organization against a determined attacker, their techniques must be understood. This presentation provides an adversarial viewpoint to inform network defense leaders how the attackers see their organizations and are able to be successful with their objectives, even when well defended. The presenter will draw upon over 17 years of personal experience as a Red Team operator and leader to illustrate how your organizations are viewed, through the eyes of an adversary.