Spotlight: Securing COVID’s New Normal with Cathy Spence of Intel

In this Spotlight Podcast, Intel Senior Principle Engineer Cathy Spence joins me to talk about how COVID 19 has forged a new normal and shifted enterprise security battle lines. As always,  you can check our full conversation in our latest Security Ledger podcast at Blubrry. You can also listen to it on iTunes and Spotify. Or, check us out on Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Radio Public and more. Also: if you enjoy this podcast, consider signing up to receive it in your email. Just point your web browser to securityledger.com/subscribe to get notified whenever a new podcast is posted.  [MP3] The world is more than 18 months into the COVID pandemic and one thing is for certain: business and life itself are not going “back to normal” any time soon – if ever. The changes forced on organizations by COVID are simply too substantial. They range from the shift to remote work and the (permanent?) end of office culture, to a whole hearted embrace of digital transformation and cloud computing. Sure, these things started out as temporary responses to a mortal threat. A year and a half later, however, they’re deeply entrenched – the building blocks of a new, post-pandemic “normal” for the business world. Remote Work Poses Security Challenge But securing that new normal won’t be easy – as incidents in the last year have shown us. The shift to remote work has  pushed the enterprise perimeter out to thousands or tens of thousands of vulnerable home networks. It has increased reliance on VPNs and other remote access technology, and cybercriminals have taken note. The compromise  of the colonial pipeline, after all, came by way of a vulnerable VPN concentrator that Colonial’s internal security assessments and “red teams” overlooked.  And then there’s the problem of all those investments organizations made before COVID. Just because workers have gone remote, doesn’t mean that organizations don’t still rely on legacy infrastructure and code that is old enough to drive – if not drink.  Fifty Shades of Hybrid What will it mean to secure this new normal? In this spotlight edition of the podcast,