Executive Mosaic, Tysons Corner, VA December 29, 2014 – ExecutiveBiz last week asked GovCon executives about their take on the state of federal cybersecurity and suggested measures industry should take to stay ahead of the threat in the wake of a widely reported hack attack on Sony Pictures.
Bill Varner, president and chief operating officer of ManTech International‘s mission, cyber and intelligence solutions group, identified heightened awareness among the chief takeaways from the incident.

“The fact that a nation state feels sufficiently emboldened to launch an attack against an American corporation… significantly raises the bar for the cybersecurity industry as well as everyone who uses the Internet,” Varner told EBiz.
Bill Jaffe, an executive vice president and general manager at TAPE, agrees, noting that the Sony hack served as a reminder that “no e-mail communications are really safe.”

Sol Cates, chief security officer at Vormetric, suggested that revisiting access control policies and credentials could be key.
“If the security controls on Sony’s servers had included encryption with access controls they probably would not have had critical data wiped or new film information prematurely leaked,” he said.

Joel Bagnal, president and chief operating officer of The Goyak Group, emphasized the importance of public-private collaboration to gain cyberspace leverage.
“Entities must establish relationships with law enforcement before breaches so they will know how to implement immediate remediation after a breach,” Bagnal said.
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