Ashley Madison hack should serve as your IT security wake-up call

From Tech Republic –

“Last month, the affair matchmaking website Ashley Madison was hacked by a group calling itself the Impact Team. On ZDNet, Violet Blue correctly points out, the website is "a honeypot for people who had something to hide" — between the company's claims that it is "the last truly secure space on the Internet," the cringeworthy advertisements it runs, and the salacious nature of the business, this hack was probably inevitable.

As the data from the hack has been disseminated over the last week, there has been an immense amount of social commentary made about Avid Life Media (the owner of Ashley Madison), and the subscribers who have had their email addresses made public. Bearing that in mind, the focus of this article is the enterprise security lessons that can be learned from this event.”

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Integrating IT risk management with the business

From Continuity Central –

“Businesses are now so reliant on technology that many simply couldn’t operate without it. IT has become such an integral part of business that IT risk management is an imperative for all organizations. Gone are the days when risk management was only practiced by a specialist department, now risk management touches every part of the business, especially IT.

Technology is ubiquitous, no business of any size can operate without it. Risk management is also becoming more mainstream as organizations realise that risk needs to be an enterprise-wide concern. Indeed, due out later this year, ISO9001:2015, introduces a new approach to the international quality standard which is soon to be underpinned by ‘risk-based thinking’, bringing the concept of risk management to a much wider audience.

Risk management for the IT department isn’t simply limited to ‘keeping the lights on’, it is now underpinning the entire business. IT risk management is moving much higher up the corporate agenda as there are increasing instances where IT outages can result in loss of reputation, loss of business and in some cases, significant financial penalties from regulators.”

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