S35 Ep4: Yolanda Williams - Cyber on the Ground: Building Resilience in a Fragmented Landscape

Today’s episode will focus on the challenges of the cyber landscape in the United States, as Steve sits down with Yolanda Williams, who is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s cyber security coordinator in the state of Florida. Steve and Yolanda dive deep into her work communicating cyber in a region where it for many isn’t top-of-mind and how state sovereignty and lack of standardisation between local stakeholders poses unique challenges. We hope that Yolanda’s many examples of successfully working with Floridians and stakeholders across the state will resonate with listeners across the US—and perhaps across the pond, too.

Key Takeaways:

1. Cyber leaders must possess the ability to shape their communication based on what the audience is looking for.
2. Organisations are much more open to cyber advice today than they were five years ago. 
3. Look at the language in your contracts! Mistakes can prove costly from both a financial perspective and a cyber perspective.

Tune in to hear more about:

1. How cyber connects to physical security (3:25)
2. The challenges of a lack of standardised guidelines or federal regulation (10:23)
3. The importance of keeping local backups and not only use the cloud (18:24)

Standout Quotes:

1. “I hear a lot of people say, ‘dumb it down.’ But you don't want to dumb it down. You just want to make sure that you're tailoring it specifically. You may have technical folks who are looking for, okay, what was the ransomware? Who did it? Who deployed it? How was it deployed? What was the payload? All those types of things. And they want to get into the deep dive of it. A lot of individuals don't. I'll speak to healthcare individuals and they're more looking at ‘I'm not a target. I'm a small doctor's office. I'm not a target.’ And one of the things we try to get across to everyone is: you are definitely a target. If you have a US IP address, you are a target.” - Yolanda Williams
2. “There are federal guidelines for federal agencies. However, we respect our states and their sovereignty, and one of the things I found in Florida definitely was a lack of collaboration. Even from the city to the county, there's nothing structured across the board.” - Yolanda Williams
3. “One of the steps that I recommend across the board for anyone that I'm talking to is looking at the language in your contracts, making sure that language is covering, not just what you're purchasing.[…] So making sure that you're looking at that contract language and have somebody that's looking at it that understands the lexicon, understands what is required. You can't just hire somebody off the street and say, ‘Oh yeah, write this contract,’ and they don't know what should be in the contract.” - Yolanda Williams

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From the Information Security Forum, the leading authority on cyber, information security, and risk management.