Critical Insight’s Post

Transcript

Hello, this is Mike Sloan, the former CIO with the city of Spokane on permanent vacation. This Mike Hamilton. See so from critical insight. And this is Mike and Mike on the Mikes. Hey, man, I'm an Asus association of county and city information systems for people that don't know. And we miss you, man. Yeah, we miss you. People said, where's Sloan? I had to tell him. Well, he's. He's kind of on permanent vacation and traveling around to national parks right now. Yeah. Retirements been tough for the past two weeks, Mike, I'll tell you that. 3500 miles of driving and seeing the beautiful National Park. Back at home trying to adjust, adjust next season of my life. Does that mean Social Security and Medicare on the phone right? Yes, Sir. First thing this morning. Fox chicken. OK, that's me in a year. So send notes, OK? OK. Got it. I'll take good notes, Sir. Yeah, I do miss getting hazed by you here at Asus, but at least we continue to do this. And that's kind of scratches that itch for me. Perfect. Yeah. I I, I missed. That's the one thing I know I knew going into retirement I would miss is Asus. Great group of leaders around the state. People that really care about, you know, IT and cyber security and all of those things. And I hear that this Asus was the largest ever. Yep, Yep. We rented all but 16 rooms in the hotel here at Samyama, which is pretty substantial. Excellent. So what's your weather than Asus? Mike, what do you got going on tomorrow? Security awareness training online. And since October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, I'm freshening up the content with some new examples and we're going to talk more about deep fakes and things which we're going to talk about now. So there you go. Sign up for SAT at the website. Excellent. So site security map, you guys celebrate that with a cake. No. Well, we celebrate that with a PowerPoint deck. Perfect, Yeah. Left calories. Alright, well, let's get after it. Alright, so topic one Iranian hacker group posts, focuses on US election websites. You've talked about this before, but now we're in the heat of it, two weeks away. Yep, we're in the thick of it. So we have to talk about election stuff. So Microsoft has identified what they're calling an Iranian hacker group, right? And it's Cotton Sandstorm and who thinks this stuff up? And what they're doing is they're looking real hard. Election related websites in swing States and apparently also the scanning and news outlet to understand its vulnerabilities which I don't know man that day of the week ending in why for you know scanning for vulnerabilities but. You know, if you're in a county, you know, you especially in a swing state, you should expect to see the signal of this going on and hopefully you're monitoring and your website logs and no when this is happening. So how is Microsoft able to garner this insight? What's going on on their side to see this? Good question. So they have defender, right, which is their, you know, their EDR agent or antivirus agent if you don't buy the right license. And so that's reporting back all of this stuff it sees and this is the way that they have enough telemetry to be able to make and they also work very closely with Homeland Security and. I'm sure they vet these messages before they go out, right? So heads up, if you're a county in a swing state, look for that signal. And so do they. Do they partner with entities like Seetha and others? Yeah, absolutely. Right. So DHS is, you know, and Microsoft are kind of hand in pocket on all this stuff. OK, Yeah, alright. So let's get into the monetary side of all this SCC. He finds major companies or misleading cyber disclosures. Do you have that that makes me concerned. Well, no. Well, if you're a publicly traded corporation, yeah, you should be concerned. But this is going all the way back to the solar winds thing where remember they are supposed to file in their 8K filings, right. If you're if there's going to be a material impact on your business. And I don't know if that rule was prior to the SolarWinds event. But they're getting fined for misleading disclosures to their investors. And some of some of these vibrations got fined 4 million. Unisys I think got $4 million. But others, Checkpoint notably was fined nearly 1,000,000. So as you see, is serious about this stuff. So, I mean, you and I are mostly focused on government and mostly local government. But yeah, I would really pay attention to what goes in those disclosures if you don't want the SEC. Rolling up your backside with a big fine. Yeah, and you know, and and rightly so with all the investment and the value of public traded companies, I get it. I wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't understanding why SEC is stepping in, but it gets attention when they start billing folk. Numbers would have lots of zeros in it. Yeah. Well, it's, you know, it's all about shareholder value. And, you know, if you mislead shareholders, you know, you're in you're in big trouble. And that's always been the rule. Yeah, that put a lot of people in jail in the past. Yeah. So if you are a publicly traded corporation CEO watching this, which the likelihood of that is close enough to zero that we can call it zero. But hey, you know, make sure those filings are accurate. Yeah. Yeah, Exactly. OK. What's next? Pesos. Yeah, well, the the article is talking about despite all this massive security spending going on, nearly half of information security officers failed to detect breaches. OK, so that's a poorly written headline because the CSO is not watching the logs personally, right, Right. Right. But what this says is people aren't monitoring their networks properly and they have blind spots. You know, everybody puts in preventive controls to. Lessen the likelihood of one of these outcomes, but you have to monitor the network, investigate and respond if you want to control impact right of the foreseeable event because this stuff is gonna happen. You're not going to keep them out. So all this money spent on firewalls and, you know, other blinky lights, but somebody? And and that's plural. Needs to be plural, needs to be checking. All these transactions, the statuses, the alerts. 7/24, it sounds like, Yep, 720-4365. And when something happens, you need to follow up on it and investigate it, right? I understand that costs a lot of money and it's very hard to staff that, right, which is why they're outsourced services like us that do that. Yeah. But that's the key to it, right? Yeah. You have to take action. You have to be able to monitor so that you can take action because action needs to be done quickly, quickly because anymore there's a very short. Out of time between when something lands on the network and you get crushed, right Flash. And if you get them, if you get them in that window, no harm, no foul. Converse is also true Yep yes yeah the days OK Bama flage there's an article that had that term in it tell me more about Chinas spammer flage yeah well this is all about disinformation and the FBI and says issue to public service announcement talking about tactics of threat actors countries to use disinformation in the in the election it turns out they're really not perfect with their disinformation and this is. Actually kind of humorous. OK, so his spam Auflage is the name of the campaign they come with. Again, who comes up with this stuff? But that one's actually pretty clever. So China made some mistakes and they're disinformation. And so specifically the content was talking about Marco Rubio as a senator from Texas and referenced. His wife Heidi, who is Ted Cruz's wife. So. So I don't know. I don't know. Somebody, somebody in China just lost their job because I'm sure they read this article too and they got a little egg on their face. So sorry, China. Try harder. Yeah. Rookie, Right. You got to earn your stripes and somebody didn't. Yeah. Yeah. So that was just kind of humorous, but it is. And it's not going to take it. A little divergence here back to the. Election stuff, you know, you've talked about this a lot. And we're coming down to the wire wet and two we. Anything we should be doing extra and I'm talking about government side, you mentioned counties and in swing states, but is there anything? In addition that we should be doing. I would say have your radar way up right, especially if you were one of those counties in a swing state. Counties conduct elections. And it's not just about they're going to hassle your website or they're going to do whatever. If somebody can pull off a ransomware attack against one of those counties or even a denial of service attack, it's not that the election is going to be changed in terms of the outcome, It's the perception created as we can't trust the vote. Right, the county, Right, this. Right, right, right. So it's all about perception. So just whatever you do to keep bad guys out of your network, do it better in this window. That's really the message. And that was always been the thread that you got to manage perception, the truth in the moment, right? Yeah, badly said. I think we're coming up to the end of our 15 minutes here, bud. In this was something good, Mike guy, anything. Yeah, I'm at Asus and Semiahmoo is right up on the Canadian border and the weather has been perfect and I can see Canada right across the water over there. This is a really gorgeous place to be, so I'm happy to have been here at Asus. It's been a long time since we were up here, but this is great. Good. OK, Mike, that's sounds like the end of it. Enjoy Asus. OK, alright. Does Mike and Mike on the mics. Mike out. Mike out. Thank you Sir. Alright, bye.