You’ve been thinking about cybersecurity all wrong, says Theresa Payton, former White House chief information officer (CIO) under President George W. Bush.

“That’s not your fault,” says Payton, who delivered a keynote address at the CUNA Technology Council and Operations, Sales & Service Council Conferences in Orlando, Fla. “You were told to create these firewalls and install antivirus software and hunker down behind that. That isn’t going to work. You need to go on offense.”

Defensive systems simply can’t keep up with the legion of cybercriminals who release a new deviant of malware into the wild every 90 seconds, Payton says. Their coding acumen and technology allow them to quickly detect and circumvent obstacles in antivirus and antimalware software simply by changing a line of code.

continue reading »