Q&A with internationally renowned cybersecurity expert

by: Shelbey Neil

We’ve all heard the high-profile names of retailers and financial institutions that were the victims of a data breach in the past year (looking at you, Target, Home Depot, eBay, Michaels, PF Chang’s, Goodwill, Michael’s, JPMorgan Chase, Neiman Marcus, and more). Clearly, cybersecurity is becoming a bigger issue every day and even the big guys can’t seem to fight hackers. Because of the nature of their business, financial institutions are likely to always be targets of these attacks.

AffirmX sat down with computer security expert Jay Ranade to ask him a few burning cybersecurity questions. Mr. Ranade is the author of more than 35 IT-related books, teaches at both New York University and St. John’s University, and conducts a two-day workshop of cyber security fundamentals presented by eDelta Consulting.

AffirmX: In this day and age, is it realistic to think that a bank or credit union can completely shield itself from a data breach?

Jay Ranade: No institution should expect to be able to eliminate all these threats. It seems that not a day goes by that we do not hear about cyber attacks. It makes sense, given that there is a continuous supply of cyber attackers and that there will always be weaknesses and vulnerabilities in any system. Sometime your controls will fail and you will get hit hard.

Therefore, your goal is to minimize such cyber risks to an acceptable level. Part of this is creating an incident response plan to correct any risky situations.

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