GoKawiilNonprofits work to provide free or reduced cost aid, education, and essential resources throughout communities worldwide, but they often struggle to meet their own needs, particularly when it comes to cybersecurity. While they're busy helping others, who's there to help them address increasingly dangerous security gaps?
Experts gathered for an exclusive Dark Reading roundtable agree approaches need to shift. They say better incident reporting, technologies, training, and attention are among the measures needed to face a rising threat, but are skeptical non-profits have the resources to build those defenses.
Threat actors heavily target nonprofit organizations because they hold highly sensitive information, yet many operate with weaker security postures, due to a lack of funds and skilled security professionals. However, it is difficult to measure the extent of incidents due to a lack of dependable data. [See more in The Data Gap: Why Nonproft Cyber Incidents Go Underreported]
Related:The Data Gap: Why Nonprofit Cyber Incidents Go Underreported
Nonprofits Are Critical Infrastructure
It's unclear if a majority of organizations can implement all the practices they should to maintain strong security postures due to limited resources or because they don't take security seriously enough, and it's especially hard for nonprofits, stresses Wendy Nather, senior research initiatives director at 1Password.
But support is essential, adds Nather, because "nonprofits are the other critical infrastructure," since they provide enormous aid to people in life and death situations.
"A lot of people depend on this, especially during natural disasters, so they hold a lot of important data," Nather says. "Most of the industry doesn't understand: Nonprofits are as critical as other parts of the industry, but they don't have the attention, resources, and support that they need."
Nather and Misata are among four Sightline Security advisory board members in the roundtable with Dark Reading, alongside Dave Lewis, global advisory CISO at 1Password, and Noma Security CISO Diana Kelley. Board member Tony Welz, principal and co-founder of W2 Communications, moderated the panel by focusing on the challenges nonprofits face, how vendors and peers both help and hinder the problem, and ways nonprofits can raise security standards.
'Too Much Security Can be Onerous'
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