Cybersecurity, breaches, and bad actors
In the past 10 years, giants like Yahoo, Alibaba, LinkedIn, Facebook, Marriott, and Adobe (just to name a few) have all experienced large scale data breaches. Living in the digital age offers convenience and ease at every turn, a double edged sword when bad actors exploit insecure networks susceptible to attack.
Consumers have grown wary, watching information and data being mined, hacked, and stolen across multiple platforms. Industries that deal in sensitive information like accounts receivable need to protect confidential data and build trust with the customer.
Chief Risk and Innovation Officer Michael Meyer works to ensure the safety of the sensitive data housed at MRS. By thinking like an attacker, Meyer is able to implement the kind of safeguards to block their success. Staying one step ahead of “the enemy,” so to speak, is integral to cybersecurity.
Meyer talked about why data breaches are on the rise, “Companies are moving to the cloud, collating all their data into one or two very large databases. Putting all a company’s information into one data warehouse actually increases exposure and vulnerability. One single breach has a huge impact. It’s like putting all your eggs in one basket.”
Playing defense against an unknown offense is difficult, but MRS prioritizes security and risk. “At MRS, we don’t put all our data in one place. We also use defense in depth which includes layering security tools around all our data. Part of the challenge is that as a company, we always have to be right, and an attacker only has to be right once. We have to guard everything all the time.”
Cybersecurity is a layered and evolving system; what we did yesterday is not what we’ll do tomorrow. Because technology is rapidly changing, security measures must keep up. Meyer and the entire security and IT team innovate on a regular basis to meet the moving target that is cybersecurity. Meyer emphasized awareness as a facet of security. “You can learn a lot from other breaches,” Meyer said. “It’s important to be vigilant and remediate vulnerabilities and act quickly. Good security is learning and educating.”
In the past year, data breaches have shifted, resembling digital muggings in which bad actors extort companies and customers. Work from home security parameters further complicate the issue. Prevalent but preventable hacks, like the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, demonstrate how imperative cybersecurity and risk management are to a business. “I think companies are putting more of a priority on security. It’s being added into a lot of business structures,” Meyer said.
A single breach is fatal for many companies. Preemptive defense is MRS’s backing philosophy. Bad actors with penchants to breach are out there, but the MRS team stays one step ahead to ensure the safety and security of sensitive data.