As one would imagine, I visit the RSA Conference home page multiple times a day. Sometimes, in the tasks we repeat so frequently, we fail to pay attention to the finer details. Yet for some reason, when I visited the page yesterday, I was struck by the warm smile and enthusiastic high five captured in the image of Masha Sedova-- the woman in the ‘hero’ section of the webpage.
Because I absolutely loathe most pictures of myself, I reached out to Masha to let her know how much I loved this photo of her—that it not only exudes warmth and joy but also reflects the powerful connections made at RSA Conference. Quite coincidentally, I saw a LinkedIn post from Masha’s colleague, Robert Fly, later in the day announcing Mimecast had acquired Elevate Security, a workforce risk management company co-founded by Robert and Masha in 2017.
Masha responded to my email with gratitude noting that by happy chance they had also just announced the acquisition news. I was happy to be able to personally congratulate her, but how strange is that?
What’s even more serendipitous is that I started reading Karen Eber’s book, The Perfect Story: How to Tell Stories That Inform, Influence, and Inspire last night. In it, she talks about the importance of making people—from those who clean the building to the CEO—feel seen. Whether it was kismet or a fluke that I “saw” Masha on the very day that her company was celebrating great news, I don’t know. But it is a feel-good story that I share because the surprise and delight it brought me far surpassed the feelings of woe that can come from reading about calamities in cybersecurity.
So, hold onto any positive feelings this story might have evoked as we explore this week’s industry headlines, and don’t forget to explore the content available in our Library.
Jan. 5: Wired’s Matt Burgess offered some advice on how to limit what the internet knows about you.
Jan. 5: According to Security Week, “The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) announced this week that it has taken down two residential surveillance cameras that were hacked by Russia and abused to spy on air defense systems and critical infrastructure in Kyiv.”
Jan. 5: In a Forbes Technology Council member, Robert Harrison, SVP of Products & Services at Sophos, wrote in a blog post, “To have the most thorough security strategy, a collaborative approach is needed in which individuals, businesses and communities work together to ensure a resilient cybersecurity culture.”
Jan. 4: The Google subsidiary, Mandiant, was one of the companies whose X account was hijacked by hackers targeting the verified accounts of government and business profiles in a cryptocurrency scam.
Jan. 4: “Unknown groups have launched probes against a zero-day vulnerability identified in Apache's OfBiz enterprise resource planning (ERP) framework — an increasingly popular strategy of analyzing patches for ways to bypass software fixes,” Dark Reading reported.
Jan. 3: Using credential stealing malware, hackers were able to compromise the Spanish arm of Orange, the second largest telecoms provider in Spain.
Jan. 3: Healthcare Finance reported, “A trend from 2023 that appears determined to persist into the new year is cybersecurity risk, as a Missouri hospital's computer systems were disrupted at the end of December, forcing the facility to take its computer systems offline.”
Jan. 3: FedScoop examined whether AI watermarking legislation will “fall short of its potential and even empower bad actors.”
Jan. 3: Xerox was reportedly able to detect and contain an attempted ransomware attack on its subsidiary, Xerox Business Solutions, resulting in no impact on its corporate systems, operations, or data.
Jan. 2: “As the New Year dawns, a cybersecurity report from Google Cloud suggests that while there are many challenges ahead, it will also become simpler for cybersecurity teams to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to better defend IT environments,” Security Boulevard reported.