Comcast Cyber Plans Include Flexibility

Staying flexible to respond to cybersecurity issues is part of Comcast's strategy, said Chief Product and Information Security Officer Noopur Davis. A key question is "how do I build a capability to respond to changes?" she said in Q&A at the Technology Policy Institute conference in Aspen, Colorado. "The threat landscape is literally changing multiple times a day," with many new vulnerabilities, added Davis. And each one "can be exploited numerous different ways," she told TPI Tuesday. Some 100 million devices are in Comcast customer homes, and that's increasing as IoT devices are added, Davis said. "The security of those devices is super important," she continued. "That’s where their digital lives are being conducted," she said of subscribers. In cybersecurity, "we are trying our best, but we are always a few bad luck things away from something bad happening," Davis said. She said when the novel coronavirus began to spread in the U.S. last year and schools moved to virtual learning, some distributed denial of service cyber incidents against schools followed. She called it "the fire alarm of 2020," referring to when students trigger a school alarm to get out of class. Students seeking to launch attacks now "can go buy DDoS attacks as a service," Davis said. She also spoke to TPI about her company's response to T-Mobile's data breach (see 2108170050).