Pacific Northwest information security leaders gathered at the World Trade Center Seattle to explain how they view cyberthreats.
The panel included Julie Engbloom, Privacy & Data Security Team Co-Chair, Lane Powell, Ellen Wiegand, VP and CIO, Virginia Mason Medical Center, and Dave Wolf, VP and CISO, WaFd Bank, and Mike Hamilton, Critical Insight’s CISO.
The panel discussion was covered by Puget Sound Business Journal reporter Paxtyn Merten.
You can access the full article through a subscription with the PSBJ on the linked headline below. The following are quotes from the expert panel, as highlighted in the article.
Ellen Wiegand, Virginia Mason Health System VP and CIO, on cybercrime being a multi-trillion-dollar industry:
“They make their profit based on these types of activities, and they have all the available resources like we do in legitimate, non-criminal activities. I think we just have to look at it through that lens sometimes, think about actual market forces in this cybercrime industry and how we defend ourselves against that.”
Dave Wolf, VP and CISO, WaFd Bank, on how to prioritize defense strategies to win against today’s types of cyber-attacks:
“In most cases, yes, an attacker is going to get in. But at the same time, if you have a good understanding of your critical assets and what an attacker would want from your business, if you have an appropriate risk management response to that and good leadership behind it, you can defend yourself quite well.”
Julie Engbloom, Privacy & Data Security Team Co-Chair, Lane Powell, on small businesses getting hit by ransomware:
“They’re not going to make the news (as targets of ransomware), but they are getting hit. It really is the mom-and-pop down the street, small town stores, things like that. I hear a lot, ‘I’m not going to pay,’ but if you don’t have backup you don’t really have an option.”
Mike Hamilton, CISO and founder of Critical Insight, on the proliferation of ransomware targeting local governments and healthcare organizations:
“They [critical services] cannot have their continuity of operations impacted because the potential impact is dead people. Local governments and hospitals are financially strapped, so it’s not likely they have state-of-the-art controls in place. They’re going to be easy pickings. So this is rampant right now.”
