By Evan Ramzipoor, Workflow contributor
Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in the Unleashing Digital Value issue of Workflow Quarterly.
At the start of the pandemic, supply, vendor, and personnel shortages forced companies to adopt new ways of working—quickly. These rapid pivots helped many firms survive. They also created serious security risks.
COVID-19 forced changes to how companies worldwide produced and delivered products and services—their value chains. Often, these value chains evolved faster than organizations’ cybersecurity capabilities.
As a result, hackers carried out devastating assaults. Notably, the 2020 SolarWinds attack affected up to 18,000 SolarWinds customers, including the Pentagon and U.S. Department of State. Since then, there have been near-constant attacks on SolarWinds’ vendors and suppliers, says Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance (ISA). SolarWinds is not an outlier: Clinton says many executives still don’t take cybersecurity seriously.
“We’re making the same mistakes with AI and other technologies that we did with the internet,” he says. “We’re waiting until we use them everywhere before we wake up to the fact that they aren’t secure.”
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