Cyber Defense eMagazine July 2020 Edition

Segmentation; an important principle that limits the “movement” within the organization, so that intruders
cannot move freely and infect other parts of the organization.
The real-life manifestation would be to identify infection “hot-spots”, lock these down and then tend to
these infected rather than to lock-down entire countries.
Risk modeling: it might be possible, perhaps, to provide 100% security, 100% of the time, but the cost to
the organization would be detrimental; either the security costs would be through the roof, or the security
restrictions imposed to maintain 100% security would cause the business to stand still. Instead, a CISO
conducts risk assessments and prioritizes security spending to mitigate the most acute threats and
secure the most valuable assets.
Healthcare officials should do the same and ensure that the most sensitive segments of the population
(elderly, sick) are being shielded from the disease and if need be, are provided with better care.
Intelligence intake: fighting a stealthy enemy is hard because you don’t know what to expect. Security
professionals, governments, and those in the security industry have been formally and informally sharing
information about malware, cybercrime groups, and data leaks for a long time. This has proved to be
immensely helpful in fighting and defeating cybercrime rings.
Such collaboration should also be adopted by global scientific, medical communities, governments, and
healthcare organizations. As this threat is new to humanity, we should all share information about
detection and treatment mechanisms and notify others when we think we’ve made breakthroughs in
finding a cure or a vaccine.
Conclusion
We can debate the similarities between biological and computer “Virus” (which, some believe, more
resembles a Bacteria than a virus), but the analogy is, for the most part, correct. Viruses are dangerous
to the victims, and they spread quickly through the population until a cure, or a vaccine is found. The
spread of the Coronavirus pandemic and its impact on our lives is nothing like the world has seen before.
It spread almost at machine speed and overwhelmed countries and healthcare organizations. We believe
that utilizing the lessons learned by the cybersecurity industry in the past 3 decades could help to thwart
the Coronavirus pandemic.
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