Incident Response

18th April 2024

Hope for the Best; Plan for the Worst

This past Saturday was a big day for the Black Family – my 13-year-old son had his Bar Mitzvah. He read from the Torah (in Hebrew!) and gave a speech on the meaning of his Torah portion (okay, that part was in English). He did it all beautifully and we were extremely proud of him….

19th December 2023

Who you gonna call?

Our 12-year-old son was invited to a friend’s bar mitzvah in Worcester. That’s about an hour from where we live, so rather than going back and forth twice, Rachel and I decided to make it a date night – dinner, escape room, coffee. Despite not escaping the escape room (the Marilyn Monroe mystery remains unsolved),…

10th November 2022

SOC 2 incident response: what’s required for compliance?

For SOC 2, incident response is an absolute must. If you don’t have a well-practiced plan, you’re not compliant, period. Why? To prevent scenarios like this: You get a panicked call from one of your employees at 4 pm on a Friday. “One of our data processing vendors has been hit by a ransomware attack!…

1st September 2022

Cybersecurity Game Theory in Incident Response

A panicked employee walks into your office and tells you that several of your systems have been locked up by ransomware. What happens next? What should you do? What will the attacker do? An example of this happened last year during the Kasaya attack. Malicious actors targeted the remote system management software Kasaya in hopes…

19th May 2022

Don’t press that panic button!

You may assume that I am a fully functioning human. I assure you, you are mistaken. There are certain things – things that most people are quite capable of – that I am dazzlingly terrible at. I cannot sing. Literally. Once, when I joined in on “happy birthday” at my then four-year-old daughter’s party, two…

5th May 2022

When your Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Plan is a Disaster…

Picture it: As a part of your new job running a corporate SOC 2 compliance program, you’ve started the arduous process of reviewing old documentation. Most of it is in pretty good shape…until you come across the Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) Plan. While your company’s name is all over it, the instructions for temporary physical…

20th January 2022

How Resilient is Your Business?

Up until about 10 years ago, I played a lot of basketball — three times a week, sometimes more. One day, something went very, very wrong. I don’t know what happened, but I more or less had to drag my right leg off the court at the end of the game. Happily, within just a…

11th December 2021

Serious vulnerability: Log4J

We sent the following notice to all Fractional CISO clients yesterday. We are sending this notice to all Fractional CISO clients to inform them about an extremely critical zero-day vulnerability that requires immediate attention – right now, not on Monday. This vulnerability is pervasive, Internet-facing, and easily exploitable by anybody with limited hacking experience. What’s…

23rd November 2021

3 Advanced Incident Response Tabletop Exercise Scenarios

Incident response tabletop exercises are a great way to safely practice your cybersecurity Incident Response plan before a real emergency strikes. Just prepare a few scenarios, and then have your team role play how they would use the plan to guide their response. The simple act of talking through a few incident response tabletop exercise…

27th May 2021

A 3-Point Ransomware Defense Strategy for Small to Midsize Businesses

Oops, all your organization’s data is encrypted! Could you manage to make a multi-million dollar ransom payment to restore operations? Probably not if you’re a small or midsize business – a small business ransomware attack can be the end of the line. It’s better to have a ransomware defense plan to avoid the situation altogether….