Setting The Stage

In the past few days, the two largest DDoS attacks ever were recorded and both leveraged unprotected corporate servers.  The Dyn (Marai) attacks leveraged unprotected corporate IoT devices…

Most companies feel that a large percentage of DDoS attacks are the fault of a competitive company

Companies are already suing one another for cybersecurity negligence

How much longer before you are sued because your devices were used in a remote attack?

Proving Your Innocence

While I am not a lawyer, I have worked with prosecution on a number of cases and the reality is that a) anybody can sue anybody for almost anything and; b) defendants have to prove that they acted in good faith even if they failed.

Especially in cybersecurity circles, failure does not necessarily translate into fault.  At the same time, and more disconcerting, having a safe system – but not being able to prove it – can lead to fault where none exists.  To this end, it is incredibly important to actively prove that your systems are being constantly protected and that your security is proactively updating against all known attacks.

In today’s world of mobile devices, large distributed IoT networks (and that includes printers, cameras, routers and smart appliances), this requirement becomes an intractable task.  The issue is that every device needs to provide logs of what is occurring on that device and you need a system to consolidate and streamline those logs into a coherent format that can be easily audited.

Take a look at your current security solutions – are any of them providing this information?  How about any device management systems you have in place?  Do you have anything that is unified across your traditional, mobile and IoT devices?

No?  Then you could have a serious issue and a legal ticking timebomb…just ask GitHub or the large U.S. service provider that was just attacked by unprotected corporate servers…