By Brian Edwards, News Editor | February 14, 2018
Skip Newberry, president of the Technology Association of Oregon and member of the Oregon Cybersecurity Advisory Council (OCAC), wrote a column for the Portland Business Journal this week which shared his conversations with several leading cybersecurity experts in Oregon about their predictions for 2018.
You can read the full PBJ article here.
OCAC Chair Kerri Fry, senior vice president of operations and finance at IGNW, stressed that it’s important for everyone, even competitors in business, to join in a common fight against cybercrime. “Where the rubber meets the road is when we break out of our ‘comfortable’ communities and stretch ourselves—with competitors or cross-sector industries. The common thread is the protection of information. In each industry, we all have information to protect,” she said.
Despite ongoing advances in cybersecurity technologies, OCAC Vice Chair Charlie Kawasaki, CTO of PacStar, predicts many more attacks and data breaches in 2018 and beyond. “At a recent conference, I asked an audience of 80 enterprises how many had fully deployed multi-factor authentication, and not a single hand was raised. It’s indicative that our community has a long way to go to secure our systems.”
Another Portland-based cybersecurity expert Mark Cooper, founder and president of PKI Solutions Inc. suggests that 2018 is a great year to implement proven technologies like two-factor authentication. “By leveraging two-factor authentication, a stolen or guessed password alone won’t be enough to access your critical accounts.”
According to Ben Gallo cloud security must be the current focus for security practitioners and enterprises. “There is no longer a dividing line between in-house and cloud solutions. In some form or another, every organization is using a cloud-based service even if they’re not aware of it,” he says. Gallo predicts that “as companies put more and more information in the cloud, there is a high probability that we’ll see attacks in the coming year on organizations that fail to bridge the gap from traditional computing models to the future.”
Lewis Howell, founder and president of Bend-based Hueya, Inc. underscores the need for a renewed focus on the role of the human in enabling and preventing cyberattacks. Howell predicts that in 2018, hackers who are “armed with relevant, timely, and accurate information” will launch a “myriad of social engineering attacks that will result in the loss of money and reputation.”
In the year ahead, the Technology Association of Oregon will be partnering with the Oregon Cybersecurity Advisory Council and other organizations to host events and provide education to heighten awareness of cybersecurity as a part of its Cyber Oregon initiative. For more information about upcoming events, please visit www.cyberoregon.com/events.
AUTHOR: BRIAN EDWARDS, NEWS EDITOR
Brian is a Vice President at McKenzie Worldwide, a high-technology public relations, social media and brand development agency, and serves as the Cyber Oregon news editor. He has more than 25 years of high-tech public relations, social media and journalism experience.
