Zero excuses

How many warning signs are too many? What will it take to secure our cyber-infrastructure? Was "Hackers" Angelina Jolie’s best movie from the 90s? Important questions are being asked in this week’s Monitoring Matters.

If you haven’t guessed I’m thinking a lot about cybersecurity this week, and with good cause! I just finished up a wonderful webcast this week discussing important cyber topics with three whip-smart panelists. You can give it watch for yourself by clicking here, or by visiting www.securitysystemsnews.com/webcasts.

In that webcast we covered a wide range of challenges being faced by companies in 2025 and the effects of ransomware on the security ecosystem. Panelist Sandy Jacolow hit on a particular topic that stuck with me during the webcast, where he references the recent television show "Zero Day," starring Robert DeNiro as a former president assigned to head a commission looking into a wave of deadly cyberattacks targeting American infrastructure.

That show may be fiction, but its premise is already a reality in this country. 2024 played host to a wide variety of deaths targeting infrastructure around the United States and if you think the disruptions to medical systems and services across the country didn’t even tangentially lead to some deaths, I have a bridge to sell you.

It’s incumbent upon us to learn from our mistakes and make improvements in how we handle these devastating incidents. So you can imagine my discomfort at seeing the current administration’s efforts to hamstring national security in the name of political brinkmanship, or worse, outright execution of an enemy nation state's cyberterrorism.

I miss when hacking was Matthew Lillard in braids.