Tom Fox welcomes Luke Wilson to the Innovation In Compliance show. Luke is the Vice President of Intelligence at 4iQ. He has extensive experience in cyber threat analysis and counter-terrorism, having worked with the federal government for many years.  Luke and Tom chat about trending cybersecurity issues in this week’s show.

The Adversary Intelligence Company

Tom asks Luke why 4iQ calls itself The Adversary Intelligence Company. Luke responds that their mission at 4iQ is to help their clients defend themselves against bad actors. “We're here to help you defend yourself from adversaries,” he says. “...We want to help you gather intelligence on those individuals so you can understand their TTPs [tactics, techniques, and procedures], what they're after, and how to prevent that from happening in the future as well.” He points out that good cybersecurity involves understanding your third-party service providers, including who is supplying data and infrastructure to them.

COVID’s Impact on Cybersecurity

“The impact of the coronavirus health crisis has been that it has accelerated, sometimes exponentially, trends that were already in play,” Tom comments. Luke explains how the pandemic has impacted the cybersecurity space. “It’s the perfect scenario for cybercrime and for cybercriminals to ramp up their attacks,” he remarks. Employees used protected networks at the office, but now that they’re working from home, that basic protection is not available. As a result, there has been an uptick in cybercrime, including ransomware phishing. Luke expects these trends to continue in 2021 and beyond: “I see a continuation of the threats that are out there now. A lot of what's going on is just a repackaging of what's been happening for a while now in the cyber threat landscape… I think we're going to see this going for a very long time until COVID-19 is not the main topic around the world.” 

Luke and Tom discuss the measures the government may take to deal with financial crime. “Whenever you have a massive event like this [COVID-19 federal loans], you can expect that there will be some fraud going on,” Luke says. “But I probably would assess that they'll put a little bit more stringent criteria on there after what they've seen happening now with some of these loans.”

Resources

4iQ.com

4iQ on LinkedIn

COVID-19 Threat Report