When it comes to cybersecurity governance, 2023 stood out as one of the most eventful in a very long time. With everything from the enactment of stronger new cybersecurity regulations around incident disclosure from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to significant changes afoot for financial and cloud services providers operating within the European Union, many companies worldwide will be called to adjust to a new normal in 2024.

The last 12 months have been awash with incidents that led to significant data breaches, government regulatory and legal sanctions, and loss of business services availability. In 2023 we saw the most private personally identifiable information exposed, business services shut down, and CISOs fired—and even charged for legal violations by the federal government.

Recent research identifying nearly 100,000 exposed industrial control systems (ICS) around the world should serve as a critical wake-up call to national government policymakers responsible for ensuring national security, public health, and safety within their borders. These systems, fundamental to our critical infrastructure, underpin essential services that sustain modern society… and they should not be publicly exposed on the Internet!

As people have grown comfortable with e-commerce and email correspondence, the techniques of scammers have become increasingly sophisticated and hard to detect. Many of us have heard of phishing attacks, in which bad actors coerce people into handing over sensitive information. These are usually carried out by impersonating a trusted third party – and overwhelmingly through email (Deloitte, 2020).

The Service Location Protocol (SLP), as defined in the RFCs, is vulnerable to abuse allowing attackers to use it as a powerful reflective denial-of-service amplification vector. Earlier this year, Bitsight and Curesec published a joint research regarding this flaw tracked as CVE-2023-29552, which details the issue as well as its global impact and exposure.

It’s well known by now that cyber attacks and successful breaches have exploded in recent years. Accenture’s latest report on the state of cybersecurity notes that companies experience an average of 270 attacks per year. And Gartner warns that nearly half of organizations worldwide will experience an attack on their digital supply chains.

Bitsight and Google have collaborated to study global organizational performance across cybersecurity controls in the Minimum Viable Secure Product (MVSP) framework. Amid heightened stakeholder demands, security leaders, board members, and executives are all asking how they can better inform their cybersecurity strategy through benchmarking, keep up-to-date with current cyber risks, and prioritize budgets and workforce readiness to meet the latest challenges.

Do you know what percentage of your vendors are at higher risk of ransomware attack? Can you drill-in to see exactly who? Or more importantly, why? Or how effective your vendor program has been in reducing risk to the business over the last 12 months? In the ever-connected world of partners and suppliers, vendors and even more vendors, the line between ‘their risk’ and ‘your risk’ disappeared. And what security and compliance teams need more of is not more data, but insights.

The emergence of cyber risk regulations like DORA, NIS2, and PS21/3 signals an imperative need for resilience. In a world where digital disruptions can cripple nations and economies, the industry needed a shift from reactive defence to proactive fortification. CISOs that demonstrate strong cybersecurity leadership, aligning with broader business objectives and proving a positive impact on the organization's bottom line, are better positioned to build trust with stakeholders and minimize cyber risks.

Cybersecurity readiness is the ability to identify, prevent, and respond to cyber threats. Yet despite the daily headlines and warnings, organizations struggle to achieve cybersecurity readiness. Just look at the statistics: 78% of senior IT and security leaders lack confidence in their company’s security posture. And, despite increased investments in cybersecurity controls, nearly 80% believe their organization lacks sufficient cybersecurity protections.