Skip to content

CISO Thoughts with
David Lindner

Contrast Security CISO David Lindner provides his top three weekly insights for CISOs, developers and the security community here. These are updated every Friday, so be sure to check back for the latest news on what's top of mind in AppSec and DevSecOps.

The latest insights as of January 10, 2025:

 

Judge_gavel

 

 

Insight No. 1: Lawyer up, CISOs!

A recent report found that 70% of CISOs have gotten cold feet about the job, given stories of people in their position who’ve been held personally liable for cybersecurity incidents. To protect themselves, CISOs should negotiate for contractual protections such as severance triggered by reporting structure changes, insurance protections, enterprise-paid independent attorney fees, and full indemnification for judgments or penalties related to their official duties.

Insight No. 2: Sticking your head in the sand won’t make you invisible to ransomware attacks

Ransomware is up: Dark Reading's 2024 Strategic Security Survey found that the number of respondents whose organizations were hit by ransomware in 2024 (16%) is higher than those in 2023 (11%). To combat the rising threat, organizations must ditch the "it won't happen to me" mentality and proactively bolster their defenses with robust backups, incident response plans, and employee training focused on identifying and avoiding phishing attacks.

educationransomwarefbtw_1057907_1057908

 

Corporate warrior against composite image of cloud computing doodle

 

Insight No. 3: Cloud spend is entering the stratosphere

Cloud spend has spiked, and budgets are tightening. What’s a cash-strapped company to do?

To avoid unexpected cloud costs that can quickly rack up, CISOs should collaborate with CIOs to understand and optimize cloud pricing models, usage patterns and data transfer strategies, ensuring cost-effective security measures.

green-green-bg

Cybersecurity Insights with Contrast CISO David Lindner | 12/20/24

green-green-bg

Cybersecurity Insights with Contrast CISO David Lindner | 11/22/24

green-green-bg

Cybersecurity Insights with Contrast CISO David Lindner | 11/15/24

david-lindner (1)

David Lindner

Chief Information Security Officer, Contrast Security

David is an experienced application security professional with over 20 years in cybersecurity. In addition to serving as the chief information security officer, David leads the Contrast Labs team that is focused on analyzing threat intelligence to help enterprise clients develop more proactive approaches to their application security programs. Throughout his career, David has worked within multiple disciplines in the security field—from application development to network architecture design and support, to IT security and consulting, to security training, to application security. Over the past decade, David has specialized in all things related to mobile applications and securing them. He has worked with many clients across industry sectors, including financial, government, automobile, healthcare, and retail. David is an active participant in numerous bug bounty programs.

Incident Response Solutions from Contrast

contrast-protect

Contrast Protect

Always-on application and API protection from targeted attacks with no code changes required.

Discover more
contrast-assess

Contrast Assess

Flag underlying vulnerabilities in applications before it becomes a disclosed CVE or major incident - all without having to launch a single scan.

Discover more
contrast-scan

Contrast Scan

Code analysis that’s tailor-made for modern CI pipelines that delivers 10x faster scans, and actionable findings to ensure rapid fixes.

Discover more
contrast-sca-02

Contrast SCA

Automatically catalogue your third-party software risk across the software lifecycle - from build, to test, through production.

Discover more