Of Akka, why Cisco deserves applause, CFOs and behavioural science

Just 24% of Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are being briefed by their CISO monthly.

That's according to a new report from Kroll that has sparked real debate amongst The Stack's community of readers in our DMs and inbox. Not least because a survey of 180 of them shows a startling optimistic view on their organisation's ability to respond to a cyber attack. Is it time the CFO got closer to cybersecurity?

We'd welcome your views too...

Twitter's whistleblower was in front of lawmakers overnight. Missed the discussion? Why not just check out the full, eye-watering 80-page disclosure. The New Yorker meanwhile has a fascination look at the muckraking around him...

Prakash Sethuraman used to run cloud security at HSBC. Now he's CISO at CloudBees. We sat down in our favourite London members club to talk about lessons learned from his time at the bank, regulatory pressure on software security, delivering complex change and a lot more, including CISO priorities, as pithily detailed by Prakash in this short clip (shot, informally, on a phone...)

Our "Job of the Week" post is a helpful airing of intriguing senior digital leadership roles but also regularly a useful reminder of enterprise priorities. Reading our latest, we note that many blue chips are still early on a journey to try and bring sprawling, inconsistent datasets together to try and drive value from them.

AllianceBernstein, with $735 billion AUM, is no minnow but clearly still has work to do. Its new Chief Data Officer role will be "re-engineering” how the firm uses data and information, “creating a new environment… that makes a broad range of accurate data and information with clear usage protocols, accessible to more staff."

Interested? More details below. The role reminded us of a conversation that we had with an Allianz CDO last year, who emphasised that his team drew on a framework developed by Charles Duhigg; a Pulitzer Prize-winning expert on habit: "Please don’t kickstart data culture initiatives or heavy data investments in terms of infrastructure until you have a serious business case — and do it in a short loop, maximizing value" he added in our interview: it's worth revisiting...

Cisco's response to an attempted ransomware attack and data breach is a masterclass in transparency. The networking giant got hit in May. The attacker used “MFA fatigue”, where huge numbers of authentication push requests are sent to the target’s device as well as a flurry of voice-phishing (“vishing”) calls, to bypass MFA on a corporate VPN account from which they could escalate the breach.

That story as published in August emphasised the utility of hardware security keys. But it's Cisco's regular updates on the incident and detailed sharing of post-compromise TTPs that deserve applause and indeed a close read by security professionals. The latest with numerous helpful insights for Blue Teams is here.

The Metaverse: all hype? Not according to DXC Technology, which runs meetings in it at scale. We spoke to Nathalie Vancluysen, who is in charge of its offering, to learn more for this sponsored piece, even as Gartner noted this week that "employee onboarding, sales enablement, higher education, medical and military training and immersive shopping experiences" were all emerging as use cases.

Our interview with Akka's founder meanwhile has done well over a million views. Why? It's ubiquitous, has long been free and Apache 2.0 licensed. That's about to change and the new cost per core is not insignificant. The many banks and others relying on this open source platform should pay close attention or get stung...

In Stack Towers, we're still building a latest event which we're absurdly excited by. For a startup, booking out an entire luxury London hotel (including all 36 bedrooms for guests and speakers) is a big step and we're so pleased at the early signs of our community coming together for it. The event is being run as a series of masterclasses, workshops and panels at a very intimate scale, led by CIOs, COOs, CDOs and others from TSB, BNP Paribas and beyond. What to learn more as a potential sponsor or attendee (strictly limited tickets so pre-qualification is a must).

Get in touch with our founder Ed Targett here on LinkedIn or by email.