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Cybersecurity Insights with Contrast CISO David Lindner | 01/10/25

By David Lindner, Chief Information Security Officer

January 10, 2025

    
Cybersecurity Insights with Contrast CISO David Lindner | 01/10/25

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.

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.
David Lindner, Chief Information Security Officer

David Lindner, Chief Information Security Officer

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.

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