Security is baked into our DNA at ThreatSwitch, and we're excited to announce that we are now SOC2 Certified. 

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ThreatSwitch works with some of the most successful and influential industrial security professionals. Our Partner Perspective series sets out to share their top lessons and insights that you can take away to improve your own program.

For this installment, CEO and Co-Founder of It’s Just Results, Gustav Plato, identifies the top 10 reasons why employees are not applying policies and what you can do to create positive change.

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ThreatSwitch works with some of the most successful and influential industrial security professionals. Our Partner Perspective series sets out to share their top lessons and insights that you can take away to improve your own program.

For our inaugural Partner Perspective installment, CEO and Co-Founder of It’s Just Results, Gustav Plato, breaks down the critical need for, and creation of, security policies.

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If you're a federal contractor, your reporting requirements just changed -- dramatically.  The days of perhaps one report to security per employee every year is over. 

Security Agent Executive Directive 3 (SEAD 3) just dropped from our friends at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). SEAD 3 became effective June 12, 2017 and requires contractors holding sensitive positions or who have access to any type of classified information to report a variety of life events, including all non-work related foreign travel and substantive foreign contacts to their local security office. 

This is well beyond the NISPOM or security clearance reporting we're used to and the time to get smart on it is now. Keep reading to learn more. 

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It’s a tough time to be a compliance executive at a federal contractor. Whether you’re a Chief Compliance Officer, Chief Legal Officer, Chief Security Officer, or VP or Director accountable for compliance, you are faced with a rapidly changing landscape dominated by privacy and security rules.

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According to EY's 2015 Global Information Security Survey, the overwhelming majority of businesses today believe their security protocols related to insider threat are not up to standard. So why is it that insider threat programs rarely get the funding needed? While building an insider threat program is on the agenda for most companies, it normally doesn’t make it to the top of the priority list. One of the top three reasons Insider Threat Programs don’t receive funding is due to LACK OF EXECUTIVE AWARENESS OR SUPPORT. Gaining executive buy-in and sponsorship can be the biggest hurdle to resourcing the level of security your company needs. It’s up to you to ensure your leadership is aware of the facts about insider threat, and why now is the time to do something about it.

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SUMMARY:

The Defense Security Service (DSS) is planning a completely new way of thinking about industrial security and the NISPOM. Are you ready? The infographic below highlights a few things cleared federal contractors need to do to begin adapting to "DSS in Transition" (DiT).

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I was saddened to read about yet another case of an employee at a defense contractor spying for a foreign power. This time it was Monica Elfriede Witt, who wasn’t just some low level clearance-holder like Manning; she had access to some of our most sensitive national security information in her counterintelligence and Special Access Program roles. This is truly a devastating setback.

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The following information was retrieved via Amazon Press Releases:

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Every month ThreatSwitch hosts a webinar on a topic of interest to the security and compliance community. Thousands of security leaders and practitioners have attended these webinars, but not everyone has an hour to spare. That's why we'll be sharing our CEO's lessons-learned each month right here on the ThreatSwitch blog. 

If you want to learn about counterintelligence for industry, you'd be hard pressed to find a better webinar guest than Doug Thomas. Doug is the Director of Counterintelligence and Corporate Investigations for Lockheed Martin. His wide-ranging career makes him one of the most influential counterintelligence and insider threat practitioners in the country. Below are the 3 lessons I learned from my conversation with Doug. 

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In my career, I have had the privilege of working for and with some of the world's biggest organizations. My employers have included CIA, the US Navy, Deloitte, KPMG, and what is now General Dynamics IT. My current and former clients and customers include a great number of the Fortune 500 and most of the Defense and Intelligence Community. As an Executive in -- and vendor to -- those companies, I have learned a bit about how they deal with security and why it's so tough.

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John Dillard and ThreatSwitch were featured in a recent interview by StartCharlotte:

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An insider threat is one of the greatest dangers you can face at your federal agency.

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At ThreatSwitch we often talk about "outside-in" security compliance. A large part of the security team's time comes from tasks or reports originating from outside the compliance team - employees, program managers, executives, HR, legal, etc. These requests usually end up in your email, inexhaustibly piling up day-after-day.

There's also a wide variety of requests security professionals need to track. Good luck tracking all of this in your inbox or spreadsheets: VARs, FOCI VARs, PARs, PSQ briefs, CUI briefs, pre-screens, foreign travel, agency-specific foreign-travel, asset transfer requests, asset deletion requests, and probably a whole list of other things that are unique to your company.

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Quantitatively managing risk is challenging partially because you need real-time data that accurately depicts your mitigation posture. Then you need to know when something has gone beyond an acceptable risk threshold. For example, if you see a sudden spike in reported cyber incidents, how do you track that? For FSOs, does an individual's spike of visit or travel activity fire off an alarm?

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Reports: we build them all the time. Getting the right data in the right hands is critical for a security team. Good data mitigates risk and highlights security operational successes and problems. With ThreatSwitch, we've made it easy to create those reports and gather any imaginable data on your security program. Now we've made it easier than ever to share that information, and optionally on a recurring basis.
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All of our customers are affected by COVID-19, and all of our customers employ employees critical to the security and safety of our country. 

It's critical for our customers to know who might be affected by the virus, who may have disruptions in their work patterns, and what their current status is. This allows each company to:

1. Support those employees who need help and

2. Manage COVID-19's disruptions to national security and positions of public trust. 

To that end, we just pushed an update to our reportable information module that allows employees to report their COVID-19 status, consistent with our customers' internal policies and the employees' consent. 

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As an industrial security manager, you have a big program to manage: contracts, visits, foreign travel, insider threat, asset control, training, personnel organization, clearance tracking, and the list goes on.

Fortunately at many organizations there are other teams that own the entire or parts of these key areas. There might be an analyst who prepares staffing availability reports for big contracts, or an Insider Threat Working Group to track reportable information. Wouldn't it be nice if they stopped emailing you and you could give them access to only their relevant security data?

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You asked. We listened. ThreatSwitch's Visit Access Request module has made it quick and easy for employees to communicate directly with security managers regarding upcoming customer visits. Up until now, we've focused on simplifying this process for a single employee. Now, VARs in ThreatSwitch are more powerful than ever by allowing employees to submit requests on behalf of groups of users.

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Security managers know better than most that the execution of NISP is constantly changing. In order to best reflect the changes the government is making to continuous evaluation, ThreatSwitch has been updated to make tracking CE easier than ever.

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With foreign travel, government regulations have remained nebulous. Moreover, as with so many things in industrial security, requirements change dramatically from agency to agency. What may be a vanilla foreign travel questionnaire for the DoD can be a complicated mess in the intelligence community.

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One of our major initiatives in 2020 is to improve asset management security and processes. We've quickly learned this is a major problem for industrial security involving the usual headaches - lots of emailing, fuzzy regulations, and long checklists. With such a big and complicated problem that ranges from origination receipt to audits to destruction, we're starting small. So first things first, where are your assets?

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When a conversation happens over and over with different customers, it is a good indication of its importance. For our team, that repeated conversation has been about reports, and it has been important to everyone from assistant FSOs to C-suite executives. The bottom line is that easy access to data is the cornerstone of how effective businesses run their security program.

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Every month ThreatSwitch hosts a webinar on a topic of interest to the security and compliance community. Thousands of security leaders and practitioners have attended these webinars, but not everyone has an hour to spare. That's why we'll be sharing our CEO's lessons-learned each month right here on the ThreatSwitch blog. 

If you want to learn about counterintelligence for industry, you'd be hard pressed to find a better webinar guest than Doug Thomas. Doug is the Director of Counterintelligence and Corporate Investigations for Lockheed Martin. His wide-ranging career makes him one of the most influential counterintelligence and insider threat practitioners in the country. Below are the 3 lessons I learned from my conversation with Doug. 

Read More

In my career, I have had the privilege of working for and with some of the world's biggest organizations. My employers have included CIA, the US Navy, Deloitte, KPMG, and what is now General Dynamics IT. My current and former clients and customers include a great number of the Fortune 500 and most of the Defense and Intelligence Community. As an Executive in -- and vendor to -- those companies, I have learned a bit about how they deal with security and why it's so tough.

Read More

I was saddened to read about yet another case of an employee at a defense contractor spying for a foreign power. This time it was Monica Elfriede Witt, who wasn’t just some low level clearance-holder like Manning; she had access to some of our most sensitive national security information in her counterintelligence and Special Access Program roles. This is truly a devastating setback.

Read More

It’s a tough time to be a compliance executive at a federal contractor. Whether you’re a Chief Compliance Officer, Chief Legal Officer, Chief Security Officer, or VP or Director accountable for compliance, you are faced with a rapidly changing landscape dominated by privacy and security rules.

Read More

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If you're a federal contractor, your reporting requirements just changed -- dramatically.  The days of perhaps one report to security per employee every year is over. 

Security Agent Executive Directive 3 (SEAD 3) just dropped from our friends at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). SEAD 3 became effective June 12, 2017 and requires contractors holding sensitive positions or who have access to any type of classified information to report a variety of life events, including all non-work related foreign travel and substantive foreign contacts to their local security office. 

This is well beyond the NISPOM or security clearance reporting we're used to and the time to get smart on it is now. Keep reading to learn more. 

Read More

---

SUMMARY:

The Defense Security Service (DSS) is planning a completely new way of thinking about industrial security and the NISPOM. Are you ready? The infographic below highlights a few things cleared federal contractors need to do to begin adapting to "DSS in Transition" (DiT).

Read More

What's New

• Added an Insider Threat Program Plan (ITTP) template located under the profile menu
• Added username (user display name) and dropdown arrow to the profile menu
• Changed the subject field title to "Who are you reporting on?"on the create new incident screen
• Changed "Watchers" field title to "Reporter" on the create new incident screen
• Replaced dropdown from "Watchers" (reporter) field to current user as default reporter
• Users are now instantly redirected to the login screen upon logout
• Removed all the "Import CSV" buttons from screens which cannot use a CSV to import
• Various other UX/UI Fixes
• Various other bug fixes

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John Dillard and ThreatSwitch were featured in a recent interview by StartCharlotte:

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If you're in the market for an inspiring article - look no further. You have got to check out John Dillard's interview with Bussiness Collective (YEC). It will open your eyes and motivate you to make yourself and your company the best it can be!

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