"If you can plan for the zombie apocalypse, you can probably face just about anything," said Tim Callahan, Senior Vice President, and Global Chief Information Security Officer, Aflac during a talk in my Master's level class on cybersecurity readiness at Duke University. In this podcast, Tim describes the key elements of an effective crisis management framework and shares several best practices. Some of the highlights of a robust business resiliency and recovery posture include -- a) well thought-out and rehearsed plan that takes into consideration different scenarios; b) world-class forensics team; c) strong partnership with Legal, HR, Law Enforcement (local FBI and Secret Service), Department of Treasury, and independent agents; d) highly trained in-house teams focused on response and recovery; e) leveraging open-source and paid intelligence; f) CEO led strong commitment throughout the organization; g) honest and candid communication; h) rewards and incentive programs such as the Global Security Challenge Coin; and j) building a caring and empathetic work culture.
To access and download the entire podcast summary with discussion highlights --
https://www.dchatte.com/episode-29-global-security-and-post-breach-management-best-practices/
"If you can plan for the zombie apocalypse, you can probably face just about anything," said Tim Callahan, Senior Vice President, and Global Chief Information Security Officer, Aflac during a talk in my Master's level class on cybersecurity readiness at Duke University. In this podcast, Tim describes the key elements of an effective crisis management framework and shares several best practices. Some of the highlights of a robust business resiliency and recovery posture include -- a) well thought-out and rehearsed plan that takes into consideration different scenarios; b) world-class forensics team; c) strong partnership with Legal, HR, Law Enforcement (local FBI and Secret Service), Department of Treasury, and independent agents; d) highly trained in-house teams focused on response and recovery; e) leveraging open-source and paid intelligence; f) CEO led strong commitment throughout the organization; g) honest and candid communication; h) rewards and incentive programs such as the Global Security Challenge Coin; and j) building a caring and empathetic work culture.
To access and download the entire podcast summary with discussion highlights --
https://www.dchatte.com/episode-29-global-security-and-post-breach-management-best-practices/
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Welcome to the Cybersecurity Readiness Podcast
Series with Dr. Dave Chatterjee. Dr. Chatterjee is the author of
the book Cybersecurity Readiness: A Holistic and
High-Performance Approach, a SAGE publication. He has been
studying cybersecurity for over a decade, authored and edited
scholarly papers, delivered talks, conducted webinars and
workshops, consulted with companies and served on a
cybersecurity SWAT team with Chief Information Security
officers. Dr. Chatterjee is Associate Professor of
Management Information Systems at the Terry College of
Business, the University of Georgia. As a Duke University
Visiting Scholar, Dr. Chatterjee has taught in the Master of
Engineering and cybersecurity program at the Pratt School of
Engineering.
Hello, everyone, I'm delighted to
welcome you to this episode of the Cybersecurity Readiness
Podcast Series. Today, I have the pleasure of talking with Tim
Callahan, Senior Vice President and Global Chief Information
Security Officer of Aflac. Our discussion will revolve around
cybersecurity best practices, especially in the area of post
breach management. But before we get into those details, I'd like
to share a few highlights of Tim's very impressive career. He
has spent 23 years in the Air Force specializing in explosive
ordnance disposal. Tim is a highly experienced chief
information security officer with a demonstrated history of
working in the financial services and insurance sector
building leading cybersecurity programs. He's a very
distinguished member of the cybersecurity community
nationally, as well as globally. Tim has served as board chair,
board member, board advisor, conference keynote speaker, and
panelist. So it's really an honor and a privilege to have
Tim join this podcast. Tim, welcome! Please share with
listeners some highlights of your professional journey,
because surely, I did not do justice to it. Share with them
how this journey of yours has shaped your views of
cybersecurity, and cyber risk management.
Thank you, Dave, I had the privilege to work, as
you point out, and in so many part of with the military as
well as in the civilian world, and financial institutions in
obviously, most recently, a insurance company with a heavy
financial sector presence. My career after the military
started at SunTrust. And I had the privilege to become part of
a new program -- SunTrust Bank decided to take all the
independent banks that were many small SunTrust banks at the time
around the Southeast, and they consolidated into one big bank
and that showed the need or displayed the need for a
corporate security program. And so I was able to come in start
my career in information security, leading first the
program office, and then eventually a group access
management support services within the security group
continuing to lead the program office. And then that led me
from there I went to a bank in Connecticut, People's Bank at
the time now it's People's United Bank, which has recently
been acquired by M&T. But that was a situation where they had
started on a very aggressive strategy. And in order to meet
the regulatory requirements, they needed to get technology
risk and security in order to satisfy the regulators. And so
we were on a very tight timeline to accomplish that. And it
really was a grounds up building of a program of the scale
commensurate with the size of the financial organization they
wanted to be. And they were fine if they stayed a small kind of
community bank, but as they were branching out into other states
and growing, the regulators was just concerned that that their
program would not meet that, so we accomplished that. I wound up
coming back to SunTrust for about four years. But then in
2014 I was recruited to Aflac. It was interesting that the
leadership at Aflac the Board at Aflac had gotten very concerned
about the cyber threat turning to the insurance industry. And
there was really no one in the company that could help that
time, kind of articulate their risk and then what we knew to do
about it. So, I was brought on to do that. We, I started really
in the US subsidiary Aflac US. And then in 2016, established a
global security program, and had began building out our entire
company, all the subsidiaries, the different lines of business,
and brought them into that corporate program. I really
started seeing, and we did in fact see that a lot of the
controls that we needed, because the cybercriminals were turning
their attention to insurance; a lot of the controls were very
similar to what we needed in banking. So we actually adopted
the NIST cybersecurity framework, but then infused the
FFIC requirements into that, in order to have a bit more
tangible measure of a program than just the framework itself.
And that's worked out very well for us.
Fantastic. Thanks for sharing. So Tim,
during your talk in my Master's level class on cybersecurity
readiness at Duke University, you made a very poignant
statement, you said, "if you can plan for the zombie apocalypse,
you can probably face just about everything." Please share with
the listeners, the key elements of an effective crisis
management framework and related best practices.
Yeah, so the zombie apocalypse thing did not
originate with me. Oh, gosh, probably 2011-2012, the CDC came
out with this zombie apocalypse plan. And it was kind of a
tongue in cheek humorous one. Just illustrate that if you plan
for the zombie apocalypse, you can you can handle just about
anything. So we adopted from that Aflac, probably beginning
in 2016 ish 2017, we adopted an all hazards approach. And the
all hazards approach was we write a master crisis management
plan that can cover anything the apocalypse, zombie apocalypse,
to a data center loss to a cyber event, a pandemic.
Coincidentally, we've addressed it in this plan. And then we
have particular annexes for the major kinds of things. So the
master plan covers the fundamentals of how you gather
together, who do you gather together, what are your
alternatives, if our communications are out, those
kinds of things. But then you have particular plans. And part
of it was us adopting a model that says we can work from
anywhere. So in the past, we had, like many companies had a
model where you would use disaster recovery trailers, so
to speak. And as we started pushing on that plan, it really
crumbled pretty quickly. Because just the logistics of getting in
enough trailers for the seats that we would need, the the fact
that getting power and internet to those trailers could be very
difficult in the scenarios that we talked about. So we adopted
the work from anywhere model and began building out the security
infrastructure for that, and the technology infrastructure for
that. And lo and behold, we put it to the test in March of 2020,
when we had to evacuate all of our buildings due to the
pandemic. Now, looking back, was that the right thing to do? I
don't think anybody would say yes or no to that. But we did,
we immediately put within the US right at 6000 people from an
office to working from home. And I'm not saying we didn't have
any hiccups. But the fact that we planned for that helped us
get through that quickly, where many companies had to kind of
architect it on the fly. So we formed that; we formed up
addressing, we went through scenarios, we had global
executive response exercise, we had formal plans around who what
part each would play. And again, most companies have that kind of
thing. But the fact that we had it, we practiced it. And then we
kind of felt like we trained so to speak, in order to execute
that. We've been very fortunate we've not had any major global
cyber security events. We have had cybersecurity events, we
were very dependent on third parties, and when they have an
event, we have to respond as well. So the structure has been
very, very good in prepping us for for these kinds of
scenarios. We also think it's very important that we have a
trained in- house team on initial measures, looking
towards the post recovery. So as we're responding to events, how
we preserve the environment so that we can later do forensics
is very important. As you pointed out, I was a bomb tech
in the Air Force. And oftentimes we would get sideways with our
law enforcement partners because they wanted us to preserve
evidence. Obviously, we just wanted to get rid of the hazard.
But you have to kind of think through that more strategic
thing for us bomb techs was, if this was a terrorist
organization, a criminal organization, we had a vested
interest in helping our law enforcement partners find out
who did it so that they wouldn't do it again. Right. And so
that's a very similar kind of correlation. Our forensics teams
have to and our response teams have to be able to think through
that. And we have plans for that. We've got very good
relationships with our legal counsel in house as well as we
exercise with outside legal services. We've got a good
partnership with our local FBI Secret Service, we attend
Department of Treasury briefings, and a strong member
in the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis
Center. So all of this forms up to post recovery, right? You
can't do a good job in post recovery. If you don't do a good
job in the response process and those stages leading up to that.
Great! I'd like to reiterate a couple of
things you said, one of which is to be in lockstep with the chief
legal counsel, and establish a good partnership with law
enforcement. Oftentimes, when I'm asked for advice by
organizations on how best to build and manage their
cybersecurity strategy, I emphasize the importance of
closely working with the legal team. Involving Legal in
cybersecurity strategy formulation, execution planning,
and review are very good practices. Get in touch with the
legal team and discuss with them, what are the likely
pitfalls or consequences of different types of breaches? And
what would the jury and the judge like to hear and see, by
way of evidence, of due diligence? Did the organization
comply with all the regulatory requirements and follow through
with the recommended cybersecurity best practices?
Ultimately, it is the legal team that you have to go to for help,
for defending the organization in the court of law. So why not
involve them from the get-go? Developing a strong and
sustained partnership with Legal is definitely a critical success
factor. So thanks for sharing that Tim. Moving along, when it
comes to dealing with ransomware attacks, as we all know, these
attacks are rampant, and many organizations are underprepared
to deal with such attacks. What advice do you have for your
peers in other organizations?
Yeah. So when you take ransomware, and as you say,
it is rampant, we've been affected less directly in
internal, we did have a couple years back, one of our small
subsidiaries affected and we we recovered from that fine, but
we're we've had several instances where a critical third
party was affected and actually shut down services. And we had
to recover from that, right? Not necessarily from the malware
that caused the ransomware cuz that was in the third party, but
obviously, the impact on our services. So it's very important
when you think through a ransomware attack, you think
through all the factors that you can be affected, and then you
plan for that, right. So it's always a little bit different
than other business disruptions when you think through it,
right. So from a true business disruption, we have business
continuity plans, and we invoke those, those kinds of things. We
have work arounds, there's always a discussion in the in
the work arounds about is this effective? In other words,
should we go to manual process from automated process? Or
should we just concentrate on getting recovered because if we
go to manual process, you're introducing human error and
other kinds of things. So these are all the discussions, you'd
have to kind of think through during a response. One thing, in
any ransomware response, you're going to slow down a little bit,
because you've really got to determine where the ransomware
is, where the malware is, that caused that event, to make sure
that you don't recover in a way that you reintroduce that same
infection into the new the new area. And so you have to kind of
bring forensics up to the front to some degree in a ransomware
event, whereas in other kinds of events, you don't necessarily
have to do that. So that's a consideration unique to
ransomware. I do think in ransomware I use the term
ransomware but any cyber extortion type event whether
it's DDoS attack, destructive attack for extortion, whatever
it is, you really have to think through, and have I think a very
well articulated policy set your highest company level. If you're
a public company, it would be discussed with the Board, you
shouldn't surprise your Board with whether we're paying or
not. I mean, it's something that should be discussed at the Board
level, it definitely has to have crossed the business buy-in, at
the executive level. So again, with a ransomware event, you're
going to have these other factors that you may not in in
other type of cyber events. So those are some of the
conditional, the considerations. I think working with law
enforcement, again, is very important in ransomware,
bringing them early, we've seen in other companies and major
ransomware events, the federal law enforcement was able to be
pretty helpful, and giving Intel and giving advice, and then in
some cases actually recovering. And when one company paid the
ransom, they were able to recover a good portion of it. So
I think, again, in this type of incidents, you really have to
think through differently your response, the post incident
correction, again, as it's going to be a little more time
consuming than than maybe other type of events. Because you want
to make sure that everything is clean everything that to the
extent you can you you've gathered all the indicators of
compromise that you've ran those through your systems. And make
sure that you're not you don't have any latent infection there
or hid and not allocated space, or the the typical things that
you go through. Also, I do think it's very important that you
exercise with different scenarios, before the event
happens. And you put yourself in a continuous learning and
improvement. I mean, when we generally have our exercise, we
bring in third parties. But we also call on law enforcement,
our intelligence partners, really part of open source
intelligence, intelligence we paid for, intelligence through
FS-ISAC (Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis
Center), all of these things help us form that scenario. So
we're getting realistic play, and to the extent possible, can
be prepared for that.
That's, that's great insight. Thank you
so much for sharing, I'd like to add something to what you
shared. And this comes from a discussion that I had with a
former FBI professional who worked in, who still works in
the cybersecurity space. And I'm going to quote him here. He
says, "one of the first things that these threat actors do when
they get into the environment is go looking for the backups,
because those are going to be the some of the first systems
they hit you with ransomware attacks." And, in fact, that was
validated by another expert, who said that it's not good enough
to just have backups, a nd they're properly secured both
offline and online. But it is equally important to have read-
only backups. Would you like to add anything to that?
Yeah, I think it's important, for years I've led
the business continuity programs, and pretty much every
company I've worked for, but for years, we were trying to
accelerate backups. I mean, that was the our assurance, right? So
you have your recovery time of that objective, your recovery
point objective. And generally, the requirements for recovery
point are minutes, right. So in order to do that, you had to do
very rapid backup. And thinking through the ransom scenario,
that can really hurt you. Even if you have you don't have a
criminal that's penetrated and been able to move laterally
across your environment and get into your backups. If you're
replicating very quickly, then you could actually replicate the
ransomware encryption into into your backup. So it really caused
us to take a pause and think through what what our strategy
ought to be. Best practices here, as your FBI friend pointed
out is definitely to have read-only backups, it's
definitely important to air gap your backup, or at least have
some preservation methodology to air gap your back-up. So there
is some definitive action that that it takes; in different
companies with different technologies, we'll we'll do
that in different ways. In fact, we have two major subsidiaries
that just because of their configuration and and how they
do things, do it two different ways. So I do think that's a
very important consideration that's different than
traditional crisis disaster situations.
Okay. Thanks for sharing that. Another
thing that I'd like to share with listeners is the evolution
of the ransomware extortion methods: from single extortion
practices, where they encrypt systems and data, to double
extortion, meaning stealing your data before encrypting it, then
there is triple extortion, when the perpetrators launch a
denial- of-service attack, so the business can no longer
function. And the latest is the quadruple extortion, where the
ransomware attackers contact the customers of the breached
organization and ask them to put pressure on the organization to
pay up. Given the variety of ways in which the ransomware
attackers put pressure on the organization, and the
unfortunate reality, that it is hard to keep up with the
evolving attacks and techniques, it must be a very unnerving
feeling that if your organization gets attacked, if
your organization gets compromised, the battle against
the ransomware attackers is hard to win, because they have the
data and you have to depend on them live up to their promise
that if the ransom is paid, they won't share the stolen data, or
they won't do anything more with it. That's a very difficult kind
of a situation, isn't it?
Most certainly. And I think when you get the
quadruple extortion, you're you're just having a bad day. I,
but we have thought through that scenario in our exercises. And I
think what happens is at some point, you cease a traditional
cyber technical response to a true public relations response,
or sharing. So I know that our number one concern is always
protecting our customers. And we make all of our decisions based
on that. Because our customers have trusted us with their
information. They trust us. In fact, our CEO often says that
what we sell at Aflac is we sell a promise, right? We sell a
promise to be there for our customers when they need us
most. And we're going to fulfill that promise. And that extends
across our company into our cybersecurity program, because
we our employees, see the importance of protecting our
customers our customer information. So if you got to
the point that criminals are reaching out to our customers,
and urging our customers put pressure on us, I think quite
honestly, I think we would have failed in our response. Because
if we believe that our data has been compromised to the point
that a criminal could identify our customers, then we have to
tell our customers, "look, this is what's going on, we're under
a criminal attack, here's the measures that you can take to
protect yourself, here's what we're going to do for you,
here's how we're going to battle it." And you have a very honest
discussion at that point, a very honest release. I think our
prevention measures, I think, are definitely at industry
standards, if not a bit beyond, but we can never count on not
being compromised. So I do think you think through all of those
scenarios, and you address them that way. I do know that we've
suffered DDoS attacks for extortion we've come out okay on
that never have paid on that we've, as I pointed out, we had
one of our subsidiaries suffer ransomware. We didn't pay, we
gutted through recovery, and was able to restore the business in
very good time. But I do think that, when you prepare, you have
to think through and plan for the worst case, and then have a
scenario and have thought through how we're going to
respond as a company. It's one of those things, you want to be
prepared for the worst. And hope you never see the worst, but you
still have to be prepared for it. But to do that, you have to
have all components of your company singing off a single
sheet. So our communications team or corporate
communications, PR folks, our marketing team, our legal team,
our technology team, our security team are all led by our
crisis management leader, we have to have statements
prescribed statements kind of at least drafted in our plan,
right, that can quickly be tailored to particular incidents
and released. We have to exercise and have again a
partnership with our law enforcement. All of these things
are your best defense against against the more disastrous
outcome. I think the public and our customers would have a lot
of sympathy for a company if we're doing the right thing,
we've done the right thing, and we're communicating honestly,
openly, transparently. They they'll realize and we've seen
this in other companies, the customers realize that we're a
victim too and we're doing our very best to protect them.
Thanks for sharing, you're spot on, I think
a really honest, candid, transparent approach that
reflects a genuine attempt by the organization to be
deliberate and comprehensive in their cybersecurity strategy is
key. And it's great to hear that there is such strong support
from the CEO level in your organization. I love what you
said, it's about selling a promise that we truly care. And
if we don't live up to it, then what's the point and that spirit
of caring, percolates right through and includes protecting
customer data. In fact, I want to take this opportunity to also
share a quote which will resonate with you; here's what a
subject matter expert had to say about dealing with ransomware
--ransomware is more than just a CISO problem, it's a corporate
problem, you need the executives, you need the Board,
you need the management, and you need the employees to all be in
unison, in how you go about protecting your company. And
that's exactly what I'm hearing you saying, and also aligns very
well with one of my messages, that cybersecurity is really
everyone's business. You cannot outsource cybersecurity
management to a team or a function and expect miracles to
happen. While you do count on their expertise, and it's only
right to do so, everyone has to do their part. So creating and
sustaining a We-Are-In-It-Together culture,
with the tone being set at the top by the CEO, that is really
the best that an organization can do, in my humble opinion.
And I'm hearing that in your statements, in your discussion
of how your organization approaches cybersecurity
preparedness. Finally, coming to the last section of our
discussion, in a book that I recently authored, titled,
A Holistic and High-Performance
Approach, I presented the Commitment-Preparedness-Discipline
(CPD) framework. This framework is associated with 17
cybersecurity readiness success factors. And I'd like to believe
that this governance framework is holistic, because it not only
covers the technical controls that are enumerated and shared
by the very established frameworks such as NIST, ISO
27,000, and others, but it also speaks to the non-technical
controls such as top management commitment, creating a
We-Are-In-Together culture, empowering the CISO function,
cross-functional participation, and many other governance and
leadership success factors. I'd love to hear your reaction to
some of the CPD framework success factors. For instance,
how does an organization create and sustain a We-Are-In-Together
culture? What are some key elements of a best practice to
do that?
I think it's very important that all parts of the
company sees decisions around security as true business
decisions, not decisions made in a hole in a dark room someplace
in the back of the company. And so very early when I came to
Aflac, and a practice I've used at my other companies too, is, I
formed a at first it was kind of an advisory council, it turned
into a governance council. And so the security oversight
committee concept. So as I was working with my my different
peers and coming on board, I asked them to be a part of
forming up the security group, right? Because when you when you
think about the company, and the other organizations, how
interdependent we all are on each other, our HR function, we
look at HR HR to communicate security policy through the
employee handbook, type, structure, right? So
incorporating our security principles into the fabric of
our company, on-board training, or each year at our company, we
reaffirm our commitment to the company and one another in
following the principles outlined in the employee
handbook. Right? And that touches our culture, ethics, how
we're going to conduct, how we're going to talk to one
another. So HR was a critical partner very early on, and still
is. So they're they're a member of our oversight committee, the
legal function, the compliance function, our privacy function,
which is under legal, so the business leaders, most of our
activity from a sales point of view is conducted by independent
agents. So we had to have conversations with them. And
again, they're independent agents, they're, they're not
employees, we, but we have to partner with them as well,
because they're on the very tip of the spear of protecting our
customers. So we have representatives on that on our
oversight committee we have and when I say the Oversight
Committee, these are the SVPs and EVPs of the company, so to
speak, that, that share the table have come on as a partner.
Because it's very important from day one to communicate, look,
I'm going to be here, I'm going to do my best to protect the
company through my technical controls and through the these
things, but at the end of the day, we all have to be committed
together, or we're going to fail. It's very good that at
the VP level at the very business unit, in fact, our
Deputy President for Aflac US has been a great partner. They
they know the ramifications of having a qualified SOC 2. And so
they want to make sure that the concept of the way we sell our
product through to businesses often who buy the product for
their employees, they rely on the SOC 2 structure to assess
our security. So they see that as business enabling, they don't
see security as a burden, they see it as business enabling. So
we are in it together and our sales teams know of one of the
best methods of selling or I guess tools and selling is the
Aflac reputation and they know that that reputation get can get
tarnished. There's there's such a high degree of trust in Aflac
as, as a provider as a partner that if we have an event, it
could tarnish that reputation. And so they're they're
definitely bought in, we have, and we do campaigns, we do
things to keep awareness in the public, right? For compliance
reasons, every company has to do their annual awareness training.
But if you're relying on that, for true awareness, that's
that's not getting it, it just doesn't I mean, I, you can go to
anyone and ask them two weeks after they took the awareness
training key points, and they're not going to remember it. But if
you have a methodology of integration and embedding
yourself into the business and the business processes, then
they remember that and in fact, we do fun things. One thing that
we do is three or four times a year, we actually host a shred
day. So people can bring their personal information that gets
piled up in the corner someplace and bring it to the shred they
can bring their their computer disks, they can bring hard
drives, we we sponsor that. And and we use that opportunity as
people bringing things to just reinforce the principles of good
sound security. We do other kinds of fun events during
during the year to try to help employees, we also have what we
call cyber ambassadors. And these are volunteers and planted
in the business that have committed to take extra training
so that they can within their business look for opportunities
to reinforce the importance of security. So if you got kind of
the tops down, and the bottoms up, I think you get it a real
we're all in it together. And again, I cannot I cannot under
or over emphasize the fact that the tone at the top has; when
our CEO talks security to our officers and directors groups,
when probably once once a year, once every couple of years, the
CEO will put a message out particular to the importance of
protecting our customers information. Our President, my
boss, he can when he goes out talking, he gets it, he
understands it, he understands the impact it could have on our
company. And so we get that support. And because we get that
support at his level, all of his reports, direct reports embrace
it as well. So it's it's been a very positive experience getting
getting this culture.
That's fantastic. So encouraging to
hear. In fact, I also want to take this opportunity to share
with listeners and you Tim, unless you've had a chance to
read my book; something I talk about in the context of
We-Are-In-It-Together culture. I talk about building emotional
capital, by creating a work environment where a) employees
feel valued, b) develop a sense of belonging and pride, c) are
having fun, and d) not necessarily in this order, but
in any order, and perceive leadership to be genuine and
authentic. And, what you just shared with me by way of
practices, you seem to be doing all of this. And that's so so
good to hear. In fact, Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines,
who was instrumental in establishing a very happy and
motivated culture, that culture was founded on three core values
-- humor, altruism, and love. As this might sound a little
abstract and mushy-mushy, but in reality, I was just speaking
with another group before this discussion, and they were
talking about how important is empathy when it comes to
cybersecurity governance. And I'm sure you will agree that
it's it plays a huge role. Because unless you're empathetic
to people making mistakes, even though they use their good
judgment, they trained sincerely, but they can make
mistakes. But as long as they're owning up to it, and enabling
organizations react quickly to the consequences of their
mistakes, instead of punishing them, be encouraging, maybe
celebrate their candor and honesty, it has been it has been
done by some companies. So I'll let you speak to that as well.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more with with those
fundamental principles, not only security, but in leadership and
life. I mean, when employees enjoy coming to work, or enjoy
their workplace, because of empathy because of humor,
because we care, obviously, they're going to do a better
job, they're going to feel a sense of ownership to that
company. It's not kind of the working in the coal mine
attitude, it's, I want to be there, I want to be there. And
because I want to be there, I want to protect it. The
employees of Aflac, we've got incredible tenure, which is
celebrated every year in an Employee Appreciation Week,
which is just an unbelievable week of telling our employees,
we love them. But now you got to do it 365, you can't just do it
in one week. But a lot of companies say they value their
employees, but it's just words, right? You've got to show you
value them. I've read a book many years ago called Love 'Em
Or Lose Em.' And it was the whole principle about letting
employees know how much you appreciate them and care for
them and care for their personal aspects, not just their
productivity in the company, but seeing them. So we carry those
those principles into our cybersecurity information
security program. Yes, people will make mistakes, we have in
some cases rewarded the coming forward. And we do that in
different cases. We recently introduced I think a symbol of
that, we developed a Global Security Challenge Coin, which
we did it for our core group, global security group, our Cyber
ambassadors. But we also use the coin to recognize someone that
has gone the extra mile. And we've awarded a couple of those
coins, they are not given out willy nilly. They're they're
earned. But we recognize people doing the right things. We
recognize that a few if you look at statistics, every year, one
of the biggest 'insiders' is employee mistakes, right?
Posting something unsecure to a website, failure to ship
sensitive information and in accordance with a standard and
losing control of it, those those kinds of things, the
laptop falling off the back of a truck. Those kinds of things
account for many, many of the reportable incidents every year.
So how do you build a culture where people are paying
attention to that, and I think catching them doing the right
thing is one of those, those methods to build that culture.
But again, I I've experienced firsthand the benefits of
treating our employees well, and caring for them. And then
reinforcing that.
Fantastic! We can end on that note, unless
you have any final thoughts, Tim. This was great!
Dave, I appreciate this opportunity to share my
thoughts and to foster that servant leadership principles
that you've you've espoused in your book and, and how they're
proven over and over again. So thank you very much.
Thank you, Sir. A special thanks to Tim
Callahan for his time and insights. If you like what you
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