Chuck Brooks, president of Brooks Consulting International and a member of Executive Mosaic’s GovCon Expert program, published a three-part blog series on Deltek Project Nation in October in observance of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month and the first part highlighted the need for organizations to develop a risk management strategy to counter cyberthreats.
“Resilience planning, information exchange and situational awareness evaluation must all be prioritized in a risk management strategy,” Brooks, also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, wrote.
According to Brooks, a risk management strategy should also include data privacy, application security, cyber vulnerability risk assessments, cyber hygiene best practices, use policies and permissions, education and training, network access configuration and multifactor authentication, among other components.
He cited how hackers use phishing and malware to compromise data and discussed the government’s adoption of zero trust, security by design and defense in depth approaches to improve risk management.
For the second part, Brooks discussed the need for organizations to work closely with cloud providers to ensure data protection and encryption and develop incident response strategies to quickly address potential breaches.
He also mentioned the importance of public-private partnerships in managing cyberthreats.
In the third part of the blog series, Brooks talked about how hackers exploit supply chain networks and how cyber defenders and threat actors can both use artificial intelligence, machine learning, 5G and other emerging technologies as tools.
“To combat the rising cyber threats, it will also be necessary to make ongoing investments in people, procedures and new technology, improve collaboration between the public and commercial sectors, and most importantly, implement proactive, integrated risk management strategies,” the GovCon expert noted.
