Sometimes the best way to inform ourselves about how cybersecurity is dealing with a new threat, technology, or situation is to just ask. COVID-19, and the resulting lockdowns, quarantines and economic changes certainly counts as a ‘situation’ for cybersecurity.

While it would be nice if cybersecurity could temporarily take a backseat while people and organizations figure out how to adapt to truly new working conditions, the reality is that you can’t do things like rapidly shift to working from home, dramatically increase ecommerce over brick-and-mortar sales, and massively scale the logistics of delivery without considering how all those changes are secured along the way. Cybersecurity is part of the pandemic response, plain and simple.

In order to learn more about how security professionals are dealing with this crisis, Tripwire conducted a survey. If you’re the kind of person who just wants to look at the data, you can see the results here. Many of the conclusions in these results are not surprising. For example, I don’t think anyone would be surprised to know that 94% of respondents are more concerned about security now than before COVID-19.

To be fair, if you asked cybersecurity professionals if they were more concerned about cybersecurity now than this morning, you’d stand a good chance of getting a majority to say yes. After all, being concerned is part of the job description. It’s not the concern that’s interesting, but the next level down of why.

What are cybersecurity professionals concerned about
Figure 1 – What are cybersecurity professionals concerned about?

It makes sense that practitioners would be concerned about employees’ home network security, but I predict this particular concern will wane over time. It’s unlikely that organizations are going to start securing those home networks. It’s much more likely that the other concerns will come to the forefront as organizations just (Read more...)