Business Chief USA October 2020

great at security, but, ultimately, it’snot
their job,” says Beardsley. “And a
lot of these companies are over 10
years old and haven’t gotten around
to upgrading, particularly if everything
still appears to be working fine.” The
blight of legacy network protocols
is also problematic, with some like
FTP (file transfer protocol) dating
back to the 1970s and possessing no
inherent cryptographic assurances.
Maintaining patch and version management,
therefore, is essential. With
cloud also continuing to be adopted
more widely, Beardsley states that the
information on this topic explored in
NICER will be developed further into
a forthcoming report at the end
of 2020.
Policymakers, too, have a crucial
role to play – as stated in NICER:
“The pen Is mightier than the firewall.”
Rapid7’s report aims to supply regulators
and legislators of all kinds with
the necessary information needed
to focus their attentions. “Legislators
and even cyber insurers want to look
at this stuff to understand what’s
acceptable and what’s not. I think
policymakers have a pretty critical
role, both in terms of understanding
risk management and understanding
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EXECUTIVE PROFILE:
Tod Beardsley
Title: Director of Research
Industry: IT & Network Security
Location: Austin, Texas
I’m an individual contributor on software engineering
projects, a technical security researcher, a no good dirty
hacker, an open source maintainer and advocate,
a conference organizer, a podcaster, blogger, and
all-around new media gadfly, and an often-quoted
primary spokesperson — often several to all of these
roles at the same time!
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