FinTech Magazine October 2020 | Page 99

great at security , but , ultimately , it ’ snot their job ,” says Beardsley . “ And a lot of these companies are over 10 years old and haven ’ t gotten around to upgrading , particularly if everything still appears to be working fine .” The blight of legacy network protocols is also problematic , with some like FTP ( file transfer protocol ) dating back to the 1970s and possessing no inherent cryptographic assurances . Maintaining patch and version management , therefore , is essential . With cloud also continuing to be adopted more widely , Beardsley states that the information on this topic explored in
NICER will be developed further into a forthcoming report at the end of 2020 .
Policymakers , too , have a crucial role to play – as stated in NICER : “ The pen Is mightier than the firewall .” Rapid7 ’ s report aims to supply regulators and legislators of all kinds with the necessary information needed to focus their attentions . “ Legislators and even cyber insurers want to look at this stuff to understand what ’ s acceptable and what ’ s not . I think policymakers have a pretty critical role , both in terms of understanding risk management and understanding
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EXECUTIVE PROFILE :

Tod Beardsley Title : Director of Research Industry : IT & Network Security

Location : Austin , Texas
I ’ m an individual contributor on software engineering projects , a technical security researcher , a no good dirty hacker , an open source maintainer and advocate , a conference organizer , a podcaster , blogger , and all-around new media gadfly , and an often-quoted primary spokesperson — often several to all of these roles at the same time ! fintechmagazine . com