There is no such thing as a safe place. Given all the recent occurrences of hacking and penetration in Yahoo, Experian and other tech giants, it’s high time we look at business cyber security as an increasingly urgent issue. Joseph Cheung talks about the issue and the broad-term challenges with cyber security. What information are you putting out there? Are you okay if a convict or some “prince” in Nigeria gets access to that information? Essentially you’re leaving little pieces of your personal puzzle out into cyberspace, whether it’s your personal puzzle or your company’s puzzle.
Together with Morgan Nolan, Joseph runs Toggle Industries, a company that educates companies to stay vigilant of threats, and to develop strong fundamental mindsets for data protection.
We’re doing something a little different. We’re going to have a special episode, given all the recent occurrences of hacking and penetration in Yahoo, Experian and so on. I’ve got Joseph Cheung and Morgan Nolan from Toggle Industries coming in to talk us about the issue and the challenge with cybersecurity, a broad term. Some of the things that you can do and basically, it’s going to be a wide ranging discussion and hopefully when we’re said and done, there are some things that you can pick up that you can do where you’re not the tallest person in the foxhole. With that being said, Joseph, Morgan, thanks for being on the show.
Thank you for having us.
We’ve had one event after another, from Deloitte getting hacked, NSA is getting hacked, Experian, which is on top of everybody’s mind, that’s half the population in the United States. From what you’re doing in your field and what you’re hearing from your customers, what are you hearing?
One of the biggest things that we hear from our clients is why is this happening? Why is nothing being done to solve these problems? A lot of times we see, especially with Experian, we’re all sick of hearing the fact that Yahoo has gotten hacked. We keep hearing that and we’re just so tired of it. A lot of our clients are asking us, “I know I have the service with you and thankfully nothing has happened to us thus far, but how can we help our colleagues in industry? How can we help our fellow neighbors in the ecosystem? How can we prevent those incidences from happening to our colleagues?”
We keep trying to tell them, “All you have to do is continue to be educational within your staff, educate your clients as well as to have a good fundamental mindset and honestly, be vigilant.” A lot of times the clients, they don’t realize that their personal cyber security is literally in their fingertips. If they choose to disclose X information or if they choose to sign up for Y service without looking at the potential repercussions and when I say repercussions, you’re registering for a newsletter, for recipes or you’re registering for what may be perceived as free ABC. It doesn’t matter.
You think that by giving out your @gmail, @yahoo, @whatever email account or by providing some nonsensical information, you think that it’s free to you, but in actuality, what are you sacrificing? A lot of the times we have these very frank conversations with our existing clients and for the mini seminars that we do. As a matter of fact, we have two coming up and we always ask those questions. “What information are you putting out there? Are you okay if the person in jail or anywhere else or some prince in Nigeria gets access to that information? Are you okay with that?”
Most people, they don’t think that someone is going to get access to their information. You always have to think of the most unsavory individual or the most unsavory organization getting access to the...
