CFH #8 – Jason Lewkowicz

The life of a Cybersecurity professional is not for the faint of heart. The job can be stressful, sometimes thankless. And when an attack transpires, you can work long hours knowing the fate of your employer is on the line. Or in the case of an MSSP, the fate of your client. You might even argue that being a managed security services provider magnifies the stress and burnout factor because you must answer to multiple companies at once – all with high expectations of you. With that in mind, this session will examine key policies and strategies that you can institute to relieve your employees of some of this burden. Plus how to manage security professionals through a security crisis or difficult time in order to minimize the emotional toll.

In late January, law enforcement officials disrupted the operations of the Hive cybercriminal group, which has profited off of a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) business model. And though the takedown was an inspiring victory, there’s plenty more ransomware where that came from. Indeed, Microsoft just reported that at the conclusion of 2022 it was tracking more than 100 threat actors using over 50 different ransomware families to extort victims. And many of these criminal networks operate like professional businesses in this underground economy. Bottom line: there’s still a lot of work to be done, and it begins by collecting and communicating the right cyber threat intelligence to profile these threat actors and understand how they operate, so we can anticipate and defend against their next move. In this segment, we will discuss the responsibility of the MSSP to understand their opponents while keeping their clients abreast of the latest intelligence reports and adversary TTPs.