Cybersecurity's All-Seeing Eye

One sobering reality of cybersecurity is that defense is far more difficult than offense. The attacker has to get it right just once, while the defenders have to get it right 100 percent of the time. Every cloud server, iPhone, or USB drive that connects to a company’s network is a point of vulnerability. Large companies have an average of 579 cloud apps in use, most of which aren’t sanctioned by their IT departments, according to cloud security company Netskope. “There is no longer a perimeter,” says Alan Wade, former chief information officer for the CIA.

The megabreaches of the past year highlighted the porousness of companies’ defenses. Criminals ultimately compromised the data of about 70 million Target customers by first hacking a small vendor in Pittsburgh that had permission to log in to the retailer’s network. At JPMorgan Chase, hackers found a server that purposely lacked some protections to let developers access it to test new code and applications.