In this Acceleration Economy Digital CIO Summit moment, excerpted from the session on “AI, Cybersecurity, and Innovation,” former Federal Deputy CIO Maria Roat tells Tony Uphoff why humans are the weakest link in cybersecurity today.
Highlights
00:05 — Tony asks Maria: “What’s the biggest cybersecurity concern that CIOs face today?”
00:12 — “People,” says Maria. She provides an example from the Small Business Administration (SBA) during the pandemic, even though she had a threat hunt team. Some of the SBA employees, specifically new hires, took pictures and screenshots of internal documents that were clearly marked for official internal use only, and they were posting them on forums like Reddit. These documents contained internal decisions made throughout the pandemic about loans.
01:08 — In some cases, Maria recalls, people were just emailing the images to their own accounts, and these were easy to trace quickly, but people with personal phones and anonymous accounts were harder to trace.
01:26 — Secondly, no matter much people have been through phishing exercises “something is going to get through, and someone is going to click on a phish,” Maria says. “This drives me crazy because you have to get people to think, and it’s the people factor that I think is the biggest concern for CIOs today.”
