The key to defeating potential threats is data.

Cyber threats are real.  They are overwhelming our infrastructures, spanning all industries and government agencies.  Social media, On-Line marketers, the financial industry, governmental agencies, defense, health care, insurance, and many others have been penetrated.  All of our personal information has been taken or exposed.  Threats continue even after billions have been spent in preventative measures.  All this points to the fact that our current course is not working.  We must become smarter in how we look at cyber threats and how we counter them.

We continue to be vulnerable because we have lost our way in security measures.  The new norm is focused on defining security from a technical perspective.  We must stop, regroup, and begin again by defining what we protect before deciding how to do so.

What we protect is our organization’s crown jewels: personnel, operations, holdings, and data.  Everything security encompasses can be put within this definition.  One additional detail is that protecting the crown jewels is interrelated.  It is almost impossible to defeat threats if we fail to collate and coordinate indications and warnings of threats when discovered within.

Since cyber only partially covers these threats, then where are we going wrong?  The answer lies in that while cyber security is extremely important, it is not the end all when we view it from the lens of what we are trying to protect.

When considering the idea of protecting personnel, operations, holdings, and data, we must comb through multiple sources of information, collating and coordinating pertinent indications and warnings of threats regardless of what those threats target.  I have seen referrals from security officers that once cross referenced with internal cyber data and human resource files, revealed large losses in intellectual property that cyber alone did not discover.  It was only by combining the data housed in each of those areas that we were able to discover that threat actors had successfully penetrated cyber systems.

The ability to collect and correlate data from each area we attempt to protect is the wave of the future.  Spending large amounts of resources in one area misses too many existing threats residing elsewhere.

The key to defeating potential threats is data.  Being able to comb through all data, collating and correlating that data with observations, training, and follow through with every organizational department is the future leading to successfully impeding threats.

Focusing all resources on technology or on one aspect of security will lead to failure.

The professionals at ARO-LLC can assist you in understanding how best to capture and use data in protecting your crown jewels.