COVID-19 has us reeling from health, social, and economic shocks, but this isn’t our first global crisis. It is, however, the first in which cybercrime plays a starring role. The world has faced several pandemics in the past 100 years—several influenza pandemics including swine flu (H1N1) and Avian, or bird, flu, and HIV/AIDS—as well as economic depression and a number of recessions.

If the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has caused your enterprise to make a sudden, rapid switch from an on-premises-centered business model to a diverse, dispersed network of ad-hoc home offices, you may have let security and privacy measures slide a bit.

A social compliance audit, also known as a social audit, is an effective way to determine if an organization is complying with socially responsible principles. Social compliance refers to how a company protects the health and safety as well as the rights of its employees, the community, and the environment where it operates in addition to the lives and communities of workers in its distribution chain and its supply chain.

Every week, dozens of data breaches are reported with some reaching into the tens, or even hundreds of millions of individuals impacted. Customers and regulators alike are increasingly concerned about the information security programs of organizations and how they plan to prevent security incidents and safeguard sensitive data.

The most recent National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines have been updated for passwords in section 800-63B. The document no longer recommends combinations of capital letters, lower case letters, numbers and special characters. Yet most companies and systems still mandate these complexity requirements for passwords. What gives?

Regulatory compliance monitoring is a key component of any cybersecurity program. But it's becoming increasingly difficult to ensure you are meeting your regulatory requirements. Driven by an increasing web of complex extraterritorial laws, industry-specific regulations, and general data protection laws. This is not a valid excuse for non-compliance. Regulators and lawmakers will impose significant fines on organizations that aren't able to align their cybersecurity and compliance programs.