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Steve Surdu

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Steve Surdu is a Senior Cybersecurity Advisor at Covington and a member of the firm’s Cybersecurity Incident Response Team. Prior to joining the firm, Steve served as Vice President of Professional Services at Mandiant, a leading cybersecurity firm.

Steve has more than 35 years of experience both as a consultant and as a senior executive at information security companies. His security experience involves evaluating and developing policies, architecting hosted environments, assessing network and application vulnerabilities, and conducting incident response investigations. He has a deep working knowledge of multiple sectors including internet service providers, telecommunications, high technology, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and state and federal government.

It’s clear that cybersecurity has become a real business issue. How do you see cybersecurity being managed as a business risk at the executive level?
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Continue Reading National Cybersecurity Awareness Month Q&A with Steve Surdu

As long as there have been computers, there have been individuals who have been willing and able to compromise them.  It was true yesterday, it is true today and it will be true tomorrow.  In fact, the fundamental issues that lead to compromises, large and small, have been very consistent over the years.  They fall into the following five categories:

Awareness

If you are going to successfully take on an opponent you’ll have more success if you know a lot about them – who they are, what motivates them, what tactics they use and what they are capable of.  If you don’t understand those things and you don’t have a strong sense for how best to use your advantages against them, you probably are going to have hard time defeating them.

Further, if you need to collaborate with other parties to be successful, they need to understand these same things.  So employees, senior management, suppliers and clients need to have the same level of awareness or they become a weak link in your defense.
Continue Reading Five Factors Leading to Compromise