Matt Eshleman recently attended the NGOISAC Conference and shared his takeaways on the trends in nonprofit cybersecurity.
It won’t be a surprise that AI is on everyone’s mind. Matt also shared some thoughts on some year end cybersecurity tips and maintenance to ensure your cybersecurity practices – and permissions – are up to date.
Nonprofit Cybersecurity expert and Community IT CTO Matt Eshleman offered these year-end cybersecurity tips.
- Do a permissions audit at the enterprise level – what are your defaults for sharing, and how are you training your staff to log in to various tools and subscriptions that can access your data?
- At a personal level, what are the safest ways to log on to your accounts? How should you be storing passwords? How are you setting your personal sharing and log in permissions?
- Reviewing these policies and practices – and actually going in to your systems and checking – is a good end-of-year cybersecurity task.
- Consumer Reports has good tools for people who want to reduce their data footprint.
Matt also reported back from the NGOISAC Conference on the trends that the community is seeing. For more information on the NGOISAC cybersecurity community for NGOs and Nonprofits, use this link.
- AI companies are not spending nearly enough on safety as they rush to market their products. That puts it on consumers and organizations to know how to protect themselves.
- AI is increasing the ability of hackers, and in the arms race with protectors, a corresponding use of AI to block phishing and other hacks is playing catch up.
- Nonprofits are going to need to understand our new environment where not just emails will seem realistic but where voice and video fakes will be put in use. Finding old fashioned ways to verify that the person you are interacting with is a person will become more important as AI powers grow.
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Presenters
As the Chief Technology Officer at Community IT, Matthew Eshleman leads the team responsible for strategic planning, research, and implementation of the technology platforms used by nonprofit organization clients to be secure and productive. With a deep background in network infrastructure, he fundamentally understands how nonprofit tech works and interoperates both in the office and in the cloud. With extensive experience serving nonprofits, Matt also understands nonprofit culture and constraints, and has a history of implementing cost-effective and secure solutions at the enterprise level.
Matt has over 23 years of expertise in cybersecurity, IT support, team leadership, software selection and research, and client support. Matt is a frequent speaker on cybersecurity topics for nonprofits and has presented at NTEN events, the Inside NGO conference, Nonprofit Risk Management Summit and Credit Builders Alliance Symposium, LGBT MAP Finance Conference, and Tech Forward Conference. He is also the session designer and trainer for TechSoup’s Digital Security course, and our resident Cybersecurity expert
Matt holds dual degrees in Computer Science and Computer Information Systems from Eastern Mennonite University, and an MBA from the Carey School of Business at Johns Hopkins University.
He is available as a speaker on cybersecurity topics affecting nonprofits, including cyber insurance compliance, staff training, and incident response. You can view Matt’s free cybersecurity videos from past webinars here.
Carolyn Woodard is currently head of Marketing and Outreach at Community IT Innovators. She has served many roles at Community IT, from client to project manager to marketing. With over twenty years of experience in the nonprofit world, including as a nonprofit technology project manager and Director of IT at both large and small organizations, Carolyn knows the frustrations and delights of working with technology professionals, accidental techies, executives, and staff to deliver your organization’s mission and keep your IT infrastructure operating. She has a master’s degree in Nonprofit Management from Johns Hopkins University and received her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Williams College.
She was happy to have this podcast conversation with Matt Eshleman to talk about year-end cybersecurity tips for nonprofits.
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Community IT has been serving nonprofits exclusively for twenty years. We offer Managed IT support services for nonprofits that want to outsource all or part of their IT support and hosted services. For a fixed monthly fee, we provide unlimited remote and on-site help desk support, proactive network management, and ongoing IT planning from a dedicated team of experts in nonprofit-focused IT. And our clients benefit from our IT Business Managers team who will work with you to plan your IT investments and technology roadmap if you don’t have an in-house IT Director.
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