98 | The Importance of Digital Asset Inventories in Incident Response

This episode of the ADCG Privacy and Cybersecurity Podcast features Ken Westin, Field CISO for Panther Labs. Ken has been in the cybersecurity field for over 15 years, working with companies to improve their security posture through threat hunting, insider threat programs, and vulnerability research. We discuss how the lack of good application and data inventories impact incident response. When data is spread across data centers, clouds, and SaaS providers, it becomes difficult to track and trace an incident and understand its impact, but it becomes especially hard if the data involves confidential or proprietary business data that is not tracked by privacy officers or if it includes sensitive data that may involve regulators. The recent MOVEit breach, which involved software used to transfer sensitive data between servers, systems, and applications, provided rich lessons in the need for data asset inventories and SIEMs that can correlate data across providers and platforms.