It’s that time of year again. Fall leaves are turning colors, families are gearing up for the holidays, and many vendors are releasing different reports during cybersecurity month. Our researchers at Elastic Security Labs released the 2023 Global Threat Report last week after months of analysis on more than 1 billion data points. As the CISO of Elastic, my team and I leveraged last year’s report findings and predictions to strategize for the changing threat landscape.

This article was originally published in Cybersecurity Insiders. In our increasingly digitally connected world, cybersecurity risks are at an all time high and only growing. With this in mind, businesses are beginning to embrace and understand, if they didn’t before, just how essential a healthy governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) program is to their organization’s overall success.

As a CISO, securing web applications and ensuring their resilience against evolving cyber threats is a non-negotiable priority. Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report 2023 cites web applications as the top attack vector by a long shot (in both breaches and incidents). Here’s a simplified checklist for securing web applications that will help you improve your organization’s security posture and the integrity of your technology.

A new report sheds light on whether CISOs have been the victim of a cyber attacks, if they're every paid a ransom, their greatest cyber concerns, and much more. While most of the reports I cover on this blog are typically surveys of those "in the trenches," we do like to cover analysis of c-suite perspectives. The CISO Report from Splunk provides some interesting insight into experienced cyber attacks and their impact.

To secure our world, Cybersecurity Awareness Month encourages four steps that make it easy to stay safe online. As a CISO, my team and I advocate for these practices constantly within our organization. If you are a security practitioner looking to bolster cybersecurity awareness, here’s a brief look at how we explain these steps to help make staying safe online easier. Before we dive in, making cybersecurity practices relatable and clear is key to the adoption at any organization.

For almost a century, artificial intelligence (AI) has been depicted in our media. Starting with Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, “Metropolis,” and through major blockbusters like The Terminator series, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and “Her,” these movies have all included or focused on AI’s potential impact.

Vulnerability management is difficult and not getting any easier. CISOs and security teams struggle to keep their organizations safe from cyber security threats that come from software flaws. A big part of the challenge is the growing number of vulnerabilities that need to be fixed and the lack of resources available to remediate them.

Last week, our good friend Raj Umadas, Director of Security at ActBlue, teamed up with our very own Tim Erlin, Head of Product, to talk about the newly proposed NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF). It was a fantastic discussion covering the intent behind this update, the major changes from v1.1 to v2.0, and how it applies to API security. Raj and Tim really dug deep into a lot of issues, and answered a lot of questions from the audience.

Every organization handles security differently, based on their needs and internal structure—but in some mid-sized and large companies, both the chief information officer (CIO) and the chief information security officer (CISO) are involved. This can set up a CIO vs. CISO standoff. Indeed, historically, the relationship between the CIO and CISO has been described as adversarial but ever-evolving.