BDO’s Gregory Garrett: Firms Should Increase Cyber Training Efforts Amid Dragonfly Malware Resurgence

Gregory Garrett, head of international cybersecurity at Chicago, Illinois-based professional services firm BDO USA, has said companies should ramp up efforts to build up the frequency and quality of their cybersecurity education and training programs in an effort to protect their networks from threat actors, Digital Journal reported Saturday.

His remarks are in response to the re-emergence of the Dragonfly cyber espionage group that uses spear phishing emails and Trojan horse software as methods to launch attacks against the energy sector.

“A successful cyber risk management program needs to integrate top-down organization education with robust information governance, threat detection and monitoring, and an incident response plan that is ready not if, but when, an attack strikes,” he told Digital Journal in an interview.

Garrett said that despite the capability of smart grid technology tools to build up data security, hackers will continue to identify vulnerable information platforms especially if such systems can be accessed without multi-factor authentication.

He added BDO aims to help clients manage cyber threats with machine learning and artificial intelligence tools.