The past few weeks I have been preparing to move into a new house — meaning there’s a lot of items in my current home I need to organize, pack, and sadly, get rid of. Organizing my things made me think back to an RSA Conference, 2022 Keynote session, Marie Kondo Approach to Security with Bob Lord, Senior Technical Advisor at CISA and Hugh Thompson’s, Executive Chairman and Program Committee Chair. For those who aren’t familiar with Mari Kondo, she is a professional organizer and consultant. Lord stated he was called the Marie Kondo of cybersecurity because he was “throwing stuff that doesn’t spark joy.”
But what if the item is something you feel strongly about? Thompson explains how he bought Kondo’s book, The Art of Tiding Up, which resonated with him when he was going through his wardrobe and having, “an emotional reunion with clothes.” Could it be that we, as humans, have a hard time saying goodbye to things even though they’re no longer needed or of use to us?
It made me wonder how much data users and organizations keep for years without ever deleting and recycling it. What happens if we don’t? Data is very valuable until it’s not, and that’s the problem many cyber professionals face. We think all data is the most valuable asset but what happens when organizations don’t have a clearly defined data lifecycle? While retaining data for longer periods may seem like a good idea, it eventually results in data hoarding, which creates risk and compliance concerns. Too much data makes it difficult for organizations to monitor and control their data.
Periodically, we must sit down and look at the data and files we have and see if it’s still an asset to have. If not, we have to let it go. We should all be like Mari Kondo, both in our personal and cybersecurity lives. To learn more about data cleaning and organizing, visit our library.
Now let’s take a look at what else made industry headlines this week.
June. 21: A cyberattack on software provider CDK Global caused them to shut down car dealerships.
June. 20: Phoenix UEFI vulnerability may have impacted hundreds of PC server models.
June. 20: A vulnerability known as CosmicSting, is impacting Adobe Commerce and Magento websites, leaving millions of sites open to attacks.
June. 19: FedEx and local police plan to build out an AI car surveillance network to monitor its distribution and cargo facilities across the US.
June. 19: According to a new study from Hack The Box, British and US enterprises may be costing firms around $700 million due to cybersecurity staff burnout.
June. 18: After being closed for two weeks due to a cyberattack, Cleavland’s City Hall announced they are re-opening their services.
June. 18: A new malware campaign targets publicly exposed Docket API endpoints with the goal of delivering cryptocurrency miners.
June. 17: The ringleader of a cybercrime ring, Scattered Spider, has been arrested.
June. 17: Ongoing coordination between judicial and law enforcements across Europe and the US to takedown critical online infrastructure to disrupt ISIS propaganda.