WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

A billion people in the world have no legal identity. Without an ID they can’t open a bank account, get a loan, or even vote. Now a tech entrepreneur has come up with an answer.

In this brief, we highlight why Canada needs a digital identity system, how other countries have made progress in this area and the lessons we can learn from those experiences to build a system in Canada.

Businesses are under attack from cybercriminals. Here’s what companies are doing to safeguard their digital assets from hackers.

Do you know the main threat actor types? Most attackers fall into one of four categories, each with their own favored tactics, techniques, and procedures.

Key Takeaways

• Understanding the four main threat actor types is essential to proactive defense.
• Cyber criminals are motivated by money, so they’ll attack if they can profit.
• Hacktivists want to undermine your reputation or destabilize your operations. Vandalism is their preferred means of attack.
• State-sponsored attackers are after information, and they’re in it for the long haul. They’re difficult to identify, so you’ll need to be on top of your security.
• Insider threats could be malicious, but they could also be well-meaning people who have been led astray. Training and user behavior analytics are the way forward.

Mozilla’s new open source initiative to document and explain what’s happening to the health of the Internet. Combining research from multiple sources, we collect data on five key topics and offer a brief overview of each.

When it comes to the myriad risks companies face across digital channels — social, mobile, and web — security and risk (S&R) pros track a much smaller portion of their environment than they realize. Without comprehensively and persistently monitoring risk in digital channels, companies remain susceptible to a wide variety of brand, cyber, and physical risk events. Despite the high stakes, many organizations struggle to improve digital risk visibility and mitigate related risks.

5 key recommendations

1. Don’t reject BYOD — be prepared for it. Give your IT administrators actionable data on device ownership and health that can inform risk-based access control decisions.
2. Encourage safe computing practices and good security hygiene, such as running regular security updates or using device encryption, passcodes and additional authentication to protect systems and data.
3. Configure systems and deploy policies that enable automatic updates for as much software as possible to remove some of the friction that users feel when manually installing updates. We found that an overwhelming number of out-of-date browsers and systems don’t take basic steps like enabling automatic updates.
4. Switch to browser platforms that update more frequently and automatically, like Google Chrome.
5. Disable Java and prevent Flash from running automatically on corporate devices, and enforce this on user-owned devices through endpoint access policies and controls.

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Bram is a PhD student in computer science at the Expertise Centr