Alaap B. Shah, Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in SC Media, in “Rationalizing the Endpoint COW,” by Esther Shein. (Read the full version – subscription required.)
Following is an excerpt:
It seems rather appropriate that at University of Wisconsin-Madison, when suspect information goes in or out of a mobile device, security officials have dubbed it a COW — a “Condition of Weirdness.”
Humor aside, university officials take security seriously, especially today since the network perimeter has been extended, thanks to a large fleet of mobile and internet of things (IoT) devices and the cloud. CISO Bob Turner estimates his staff is tasked with managing some 100,000 endpoint devices, which he defines as anything that is not a switch or router. This includes laptops, smartphones, IoT sensors, surveillance cameras, tower servers, cloud and virtual components, classroom- and network-connected printers, access control systems, imaging devices, and mobile display devices around campus.
Managing and securing all those endpoints is a never-ending challenge. Based on research the university and others have done, UW-Madison security officials feel confident they can figure out when something does not look quite right. …
Attorney Alaap Shah, a privacy and cybersecurity expert with the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Epstein Becker & Green P.C., agrees that knowing what you have and where it is located is essential. That is why companies should employ effective network mapping tools.
“Once the tech landscape is catalogued,” he says “professionals should assess how best to segment, configure, patch and run routine malware scanning on such devices. Each environment will require different security strategies and tactics.”
