Written by Devin Lynch, Senior Director, Policy & Government Affairs, SecurityScorecard
As CISA’s 4th Annual National Cybersecurity Summit concludes this week, the theme for the final day is “The Power of Partnerships.” Before national cybersecurity month concludes, we should take a moment to join CISA and consider the power of partnerships.
We all want the same thing: to improve the overall cybersecurity of the global digital ecosystem. In order to make the cyber world a safer place, though, we must transform the way we communicate cybersecurity risks, and we can only achieve this through the power of partnerships.
Partnerships create the trust and information-sharing ecosystem that are necessary to protect end-users―from industry, to the Federal government, to our customers―against malicious cyber actors. Whereas a bank robber needs to study the blueprints of each bank and create a new plan to execute if he wants to rob multiple banks, a cyber threat actor can use a single vulnerability to penetrate numerous systems with a single weapon. Our individual security is therefore dependent on a communal approach.
Information sharing partnerships like the Cyber Threat Alliance are able to provide early indicators and warnings of cyber threats, allowing companies to stay ahead of risks posed to their own systems and by those of their third-party vendors. This valuable service is increasingly important today, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to keep many of our critical―and even more of our mundane―activities online.
It is the power of partnerships like CTA that allow the security community to collaborate and share information about malicious cyber actors before they impact our information systems. Working together with our partners, we are able to better identify and respond to cyber incidents. This allows us all to reduce the overall effectiveness of these attacks, and protect our customers and our intellectual property.
And, it is the power of partnerships that will help us elevate the overall cybersecurity of the global marketplace, and promote technologies and policies that build resilience into, and improve the health of, the cyber ecosystem.
SecurityScorecard is a proud member of the Cyber Threat Alliance because we accept the simple premise that if we all want a safer, more resilient cyber ecosystem, we must continue to collaborate, communicate, and coordinate against the threat actors facing us. If we want to achieve our shared goals, we need to work together.
That is the power of partnerships.