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Illustration of two light yellow masks  on a purple background are in profile next to each other. The mask on the left is tipped over and leaning against the mask on the right. A speech bubble coming from the mask on the left is going through the mouth of the other mask.

Hatejacked: How to Monitor for Co-Opted Messaging

As corporate messengers seek to use their messaging to distinguish their brand, it is also imperative that organizations are mindful of—and take active precautions against—the misuse of the brand by potential adversaries, extremists, and opportunists seeking to co-opt elements of their messaging.

Our 9 Favorite Illustrations of 2022

The Security Management design team has the momentous challenge of visually bringing our complex stories to life. Here are 9 designs that were their favorite to collaborate on in 2022.

How to Identify Forced Labor in Your Supply Chain

The European Union (EU) and the United States, among other jurisdictions, have tough laws in place to deter exploitative practices, but forced labor persists. A sound risk management strategy is a strong first step employers can take to help prevent exploitative practices.

Our 12 Most-Read Stories of 2022

The Security Management editorial team and contributing authors wrote hundreds of articles in 2022. Here are the 12 that readers kept returning to throughout the year.

Trauma-Informed Approach Infographic

Infographic: Trauma-Informed Approach

The core principles of trauma-informed approach can be applied to healthcare organizations’ programs in identifying, approaching, and supporting victims of human trafficking.

A dinosaur illustration takes  a selfie.

Nine Security Social Media Accounts that are Making a Mark

When it comes to security awareness, a little humor goes a long way. Security Management collected a list of some of our favorite security social media accounts and movements that are hitting the mark and inspiring new energy in the industry.

How Political Affiliation Bias Heightens Workplace Tensions

Almost a quarter of the 504 workers surveyed by SHRM in late August (24 percent) say they have personally experienced differential treatment, either positive or negative, because of their political views, compared with 12 percent of U.S workers in 2019.

Illustration of a doctor wearing a white lab coat standing inside a blue brain. He is illuminating the brain with flashlight.

Treating Trauma

Today, there’s more awareness than ever of the trauma that first responders and security practitioners experience while on the job. But we’re only beginning to understand how to treat it and remove the stigma associated with seeking care.

How Alternative Credentials Can Help You Find Employees

If organizations expand their candidate search methods beyond the traditional bachelor’s or associate degrees, they will find a throng of candidates with the skills they need, earned through unconventional means. This will be a boon not only for those individuals, but also for the companies they serve.

3 Benefits of Alternative Credentials

“Skill-based hiring reduces barriers to entry that disproportionately affect minority workers,” says Kate Markin Coleman, co-author of Growing Fairly: How to Build Opportunity and Equity in Workforce Development.

How Educational Institutions Can Help Fill the Cybersecurity Workforce Gap

Educational institutions can help fill the deficit in national cybersecurity capacity. One way this can be accomplished is by bridging the gap between STEM and non-STEM disciplines through the creation of educational programs that provide essential technical cybersecurity-related knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Workplace Dating Data Infographic

Infographic: Workplace Dating Data

Even though many employees are working remotely, workplace romances are on the rise—6 percent more workers reported being involved in a workplace romance in 2022 compared to 2019, according to a January 2022 survey of 550 U.S. employees.

Animated image for top 7 stolen retail items video.

Video: Top Targeted Items for Retail Crime

Inflation is high, and it’s driving retail theft higher. Organized retail crime groups are perusing grocery store shelves to steal easily resold items, which could have heavy ramifications for stores’ bottom lines.

Ready, Stress, Go! Why Active Shooter Training Fails

The purpose of training is to inspire a sense of confidence and competence where knowledge and skill are otherwise wanting. Training that leaves participants terrorized, anxious, and bruised fails the foundational ideal that makes it meaningful.

Zero Trust

Why Zero Trust Must Extend into Deep Infrastructure

Serious, persistent threats are already looming in your infrastructure. The lowest-hanging fruit—and the most vulnerable point of attack—is where you may least expect it: the hardware and firmware that lies in the deep layers of your physical infrastructure.

How to Get Real Results with Virtual Training

Virtual reality isn’t typically used to hone soft skills such as improving leadership or communication, though more companies are considering it. Instead, it’s a conduit to developing physical skills like repairing a piece of equipment or learning the most effective way to stack boxes in a warehouse.

Building Your Personal Brand Through ASIS Certification and Networking

"Trust is the key to being a successful CSO. I must continuously cultivate my brand to demonstrate that I am a trustworthy person who has the experience and expertise to guide my company through a maze of security risks," writes Scott Wolford, CPP. "This is achieved by building a system that consistently communicates my values, skills, and personality."

Crime Prevention Travel Tips in Mexico

Cancun remains one of the safest locations for tourists and travelers in Mexico, but recent incidents reinforce the message that violence can happen anywhere, and cartel activity can spill over and threaten bystanders.

How do you build a great workplace security culture? It starts with the security leader’s ability to emotionally connect with staff.

How to Build a Best-in-Class Security Culture

Building a sustained security culture starts with the security leader’s ability to emotionally connect, engage, and partner with people at all levels of the organization, from the C-suite to the third-shift frontline associate.

Common Succession Plan Mistakes

6 Common Blunders in Succession Planning

The biggest mistake in succession planning is the failure to plan at all, but for those implementing succession planning processes, there are a few other pitfalls to watch for.

Exploit Risk Management Best Practice

Exploit: The Forgotten Fifth Option of Risk Management

Security professionals often view risk only in negative terms, and they are taught there are four commonly accepted options for treating risk: accept it, avoid it, manage it, or share it. However, there is a fifth option that is often overlooked but can be very positive to those who understand it: exploit it.

5 Steps to Personal Branding Success

Ready to take control of your professional reputation? It requires intention, dedication, and diligence to keep your message on track, and it’s a skill that CSOs need to be particularly adept at.

Infographic: Risks in the Great Resignation

Port operators and shipping companies are getting back to full capacity after widespread resignations, but is the new workforce skilled enough and sufficiently trustworthy to keep shipments flowing safely?

When Personal Branding Becomes Personal Risk

As security professionals launch and cultivate their personal brands on public-facing channels such as social media, they can draw attention to themselves. While increasing security’s profile is not necessarily a bad thing, understanding the risks and challenges is essential.

How to Build and Maintain a Personal Brand

“Branding doesn't mean boasting, but it means being really clear about who you are, who you want to serve, and how you want people to experience you,” says Lida Citroën, a personal branding expert and a 2022 CSO Center Leadership Series speaker.

Greet, Pray, Love

Houses of worship must turn to different types of training to protect their flocks. One synagogue shifted to a non-confrontational crisis response exercise.

Mosqueda-Soft

Career Advice: Mind Your Skill Gaps

As young professionals build up their experience within security, it can be easy to miss some essential areas that CSOs look for in their successors. Here, two members of the ASIS CSO Center share career advice and professional development tips.

The Milestones in the Marathon

Being a security leader can feel like an unending race, but establishing personal and professional finish lines to mark accomplishments and demonstrate progress can reinvigorate both managers and their departments.

Targeting All Lonely Hearts

Romance scams are easier than ever through social media and online dating, and the schemes can be very profitable for fraudsters.

Unraveling the OSINT Oxymoron

There is almost infinite data freely available, and yet, it is so often ignored because of its sheer size and complexity. So, how can security professionals sift through the information to detect fraud?

Three Security Disconnects that Fall Through the Cracks

In strengthening one’s organization to withstand the challenges of tomorrow, it is critical to focus on the three most common disconnects taking place today, primarily around standardization, personnel, and system maintenance.

Business Strategy

Five Tools to Drive Cyber Success

Understanding how policies, procedures, and tools impact your security posture is critical. A new report helps shed light on what’s working, what’s not, and how security leaders can adopt best practices with C-suite engagement.

Leveraging the GSOC During COVID-19

At industrial gas company Air Products, the global security operations center continues to play a critical role and add value for the organization and its stakeholders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Case of Crisis, Build Community

In the face of natural disasters increasing in both frequency and ferocity, when the lights go out businesses should look to a nearby network of neighbors to get back up and running faster.

Overcoming Five Preventive Intelligence Hurdles

A modern enterprise's products and services increasingly exist online or in software code. Corporate assets are increasingly digital assets. This shift calls for the implementation of preventive intelligence, an approach that spans the online and physical worlds.

Restructuring School Security Planning and Awareness

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, schools were typically very regimented about the main entrance security of their buildings. Security assessments conducted during the pandemic, by contrast, illustrated a very relaxed main entrance security posture.

cloud adoption

Cloud in the Crosshairs

Organizations are increasingly embracing opportunities to leverage the cloud, which can create security risks if vulnerabilities are left unaddressed.

The Tao of Taleb: Learning from COVID-19

As COVID-19 approaches its two-year anniversary, security and risk management professionals would be wise to reflect on past failures in hopes of making our society antifragile to future global calamities.

Research Review: Quality of Work Life for Bank Guards

Researchers conducted a case study in 43 bank branches in the Brazilian city of Campos dos Goytacazes to determine the most important aspects of what security guards considered in evaluating their quality of work life (QWL).

Onboarding Using Zoom

Onboarding Beyond Zoom

Millions of people are transitioning to new, changed, or evolving roles in the post-pandemic upheaval. As onboarding shifts virtual, CSOs have an opportunity to leverage a new normal of online meetings to get up to speed and begin adding value faster and more effectively.

Cyber Lexicon

Cyber 101 for Physical Security Practitioners

When it comes to cybersecurity, there are many terms and concepts that are beneficial for physical security professionals and IT professionals alike to understand. Here are a few to help you get started.

Assigning Roles for Campus Security Awareness

The high student population, prevailing freedom, lack of guardians, and homogenous nature of the college campus setting create an environment with many opportunities for crime to occur. A modified security model is therefore needed.

Challenges in Higher Education Security: Open Environments

The initial step in developing a balanced security program is engagement with users at all levels. This includes understanding the privacy concerns of residents, safety issues surrounding various modes of transport, and layered security controls of a multipurpose building.

Balancing Needs and Wants Against Situational Realities in Campus Security

As the threat landscape has changed, security leaders have had to adapt. It is infinitely important that the leaders responsible for the safety and security on university and healthcare campuses comprehend and strike a balance between needs versus wants as they build their programs to respond to changes.

Challenges in Higher Education Security: Portfolio Administration

Multifaceted requirements at universities make creating a project portfolio for management large and expensive to build, complex to manage, and challenging to maintain. Portfolios can therefore risk exposure to legacy systems, inefficient processes, and high costs of ownership.

Don't Play So Close to Me

Casinos and gaming facilities are increasingly relying on touchless methods to ensure guests can safely play, allowing them to scale their pandemic mitigation measures.

Employee Activism as a Risk Management Opportunity

The combination of increased activism and elevated divisiveness presents a heightened threat for conflict entering the workplace, particularly for corporations whose employees are returning to the office after working remotely.

The Insider Threat and Extremist Rhetoric

While the growth of polarizing and extremist rhetoric may be most commonly attributed to an advancing Internet, the traditional approaches to mitigating insider threat risks may also be effective in reducing the incendiary quality of extremist rhetoric before it results in harm or destruction.

Returning to Work the ESRM Way

With vaccinations on the rise, organizations are seriously contemplating whether and how to return to physical workspaces. By leveraging ESRM principles, security leaders can help steer the conversation.

How to Avoid Pandemic-Related Litigation Risks

Worries over workplace safety in the COVID-19 era, as well as concerns about the impacts of business closings, plant shutdowns and mandatory stay-at-home orders, spawned more than 2,000 lawsuits from January 2020 through March 2021.

core services

Updating Business Continuity Basics After COVID-19

Core services do not mean all services. In a private enterprise scenario, your core functions must be identified so that your continuity plan ensures at least their partial operation within the shortest amount of time possible.

A Portrait of Fire Prevention

When it comes to protecting priceless pieces of cultural heritage, following industry best practices with planning, automation, and early response measure proves essential.

Time to Pivot: Applying ESRM After COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic may have provided an ideal push for organizations to implement an ESRM approach to resilience and crisis management, which can multiply security’s value to the business.

Ancient Art, Illicit Revenue

Organized crime groups, terrorists, and state actors have all dabbled in antiquities trafficking to fund their operations. But the scale of the market remains elusive due to the diversity and secrecy of the art world.

flood

The Preparedness Puzzle

Resilience is a multifaceted concept, and depending on which way you view it, you may see different challenges and stronger solutions, says Michael Szönyi, Flood Resilience Program Lead at Zurich Insurance Company.

Protective Intelligence

Getting Proactive with Protective Intelligence

Eighty-seven percent of security, legal, and compliance executives agree that investment in technology to advance physical security effectiveness and mitigate violent threats is necessary for the future of their company, according to a recent study from the Ontic Center for Protective Intelligence.

Adjusting Security Awareness for Remote Work Hygiene

As the lines between work and leisure time become increasingly blurred and employees use company-issued devices and resources for personal use—such as social media, online shopping, and even telehealth—the potential for cyberattacks is ever present.

public private partnerships

Public–Private Partnership Case Study: OSAC

Nearly three decades ago, the U.S. government grew increasingly concerned of the potential negative impacts of rising globalization and terrorism on U.S. corporations with international operations, giving rise to the creation of the Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC).

Answering to Abuse

With more employees working remote and from home, companies’ have become increasingly liable once a victim informs them that he or she now works and lives with the abuser.

geopolitical security strategy

The Chief Security Strategist in an Age of Uncertainty

The contemporary CSO has to understand the geopolitical dynamics of the 21st century. In an interconnected and a globalized world, a crisis in one part of the world will have profound cascading effects on organizations on the other side of the globe.

Shared Successes: Building Collaborative Professional Networks

Where do I start? It’s a common refrain, whether it’s coming from a young professional just entering the security industry, a former law enforcement officer building her first private sector SOP, or a security industry veteran preparing to combat a new crisis. Fortunately, few of these paths need to be walked alone.

Embracing True Diversity in Times of Crisis

The business case for diversity is stronger than ever. A 2020 report found that companies that foster gender diversity are 25 percent more likely to have above-average profitability than companies that don’t.

Training Security Guards to Identify Sex Trafficking Victims

Child sex trafficking is a multi-billion dollar a year business. Besides the moral obligation to combat domestic minor sex trafficking, businesses are criminally and civilly liable as facilitators for indirectly, but knowingly, profiting from the venture in reckless disregard to use of a minor.

employee engagement

Measuring Employee Engagement During a Crisis

For companies to maintain a motivated, productive workforce, organizations need to find the best methods to gather and interpret employee feedback, including from remote workers, and make changes accordingly, experts say.

Q&A: Essential Takeaways from the 6 January Riot at the U.S. Capitol

As U.S. federal law enforcement agencies warn of a potential wave of armed protests across the United States in the coming week, members of the ASIS International Extremism and Political Instability Community share lessons learned, analysis, and preparedness advice for the days ahead.

qanon-glossary

Q-Speak: The Language of QAnon

Knowing the basics about QAnon, as well as the terminology and beliefs of this movement, can help security leaders recognize when someone is being led down the rabbit hole and possibly becoming a risk.

Softening the Impact of a Hard Insurance Market

The year 2020 started inauspiciously with a hard security insurance market in the United States. This meant security firms experienced rising premiums and tightening underwriting guidelines, largely due to concerns about claims, costly legal settlements, and risk management in the industry. These issues were only exacerbated by the emergence of COVID-19 and civil unrest.

Managing Stress, Leading, and Serving Through Crises

Crises are by nature unpredictable and uncertain. Our brains process uncertain and unpredictable events as life-or-death threats. During a crisis, one of the key steps to manage our stress and our emotions and to foster our perspective and analytical reasoning is to de-shame.

Protecting Shops from Looting

Beyond retail shrink caused by shoplifters, internal thieves, or fraudulent returns, retailers are also aware of the risks posed by those taking advantage of chaos from mass protests that have become regular occurrences in 2020.

Leading with Empathy: Fostering Engaged Workforces

Much like the world we live in, the security business has changed, and the lessons gained serve as a powerful reminder that to be effective in our industry, we need to evolve as leaders to get the best out of our people.

Rethinking SOC Functionality and Cost

Considering the global shift toward more service-based providers and platforms for physical security, it can be argued that the overall cost of protection is being reduced.

How to Avoid Eight Diversity Recruiting Mistakes

Employers are re-evaluating workplace diversity at their organizations, starting with being more thoughtful about recruiting from a broader range of talent. However, these efforts are not without pitfalls.

Monitoring Remote Workers

Monitoring tools can track productivity and guard against security threats, but employers should weigh the benefits against the legal risks.

Three Steps to Avoid Security Theater

Not all risk mitigation measures are made equal. When managers deploy countermeasures without first understanding and addressing the company’s own specific risk posture, they are contributing to “security theater”—a concept that refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security.

Change Drivers: Organizations Face Supercharged Activism

“The push for companies to show what they are doing for the greater good will only intensify through the lens of the pandemic; the public will want to know whether companies put people or profits first during this global crisis,” says Allison Wood, an associate director at Control Risks.

COVID-19: The Rise in Domestic Violence

Alongside the COVID-19 pandemic, a less-publicized public health crisis is surging across the globe—domestic violence. This guide for employers can help address employee needs and workplace concerns during remote work and return-to-work settings.

Ready for Reentry?

As organizations reopen their facilities, they must be aware of threats that may arise from a lack of human presence during shelter-at-home orders, such as the opportunity for Legionnaires’ disease outbreaks.

Conducting COVID-19 "In-Flight" Incident Reviews

At this time, there is tremendous value in briefly pausing to reflect on the organization’s COVID-19 journey to date and conduct an “in-flight” incident review as a means of optimizing the approach going forward.

A Guide to Employee Temperature Checks

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) gave employers the green light to take employees' temperatures to try and ward off the spread of the coronavirus. But will taking temperatures really work?

Q&A: Agility and Planning for Multinational Pandemic Response

For international business services company PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), managing business continuity and crisis response to the coronavirus pandemic has tested its international, regional and national capabilities. However, key steps—such as the early creation of a dedicated task force for information sharing—have driven a more streamlined, agile crisis response.

How to Reopen Your Mail Centers

In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, many companies shut down their offices and told people to work from home. As they begin to reopen, companies will face several major hurdles in their mail centers.

ESRM and the COVID-19 Pandemic

The preparation involved in enterprise security risk management (ESRM) enables organizations to act decisively and confidently in times of crisis.

In Crisis Communication, Start with Empathy

Crisis response hinges on two factors: what the organization does and what the organization says. When these halves align, it results in trust and a more positively received and effective response.

Q&A: Security’s Role During Pandemic Response

Scott Stewart from Stratfor explains how security professionals can leverage their creative problem-solving skills and preparedness to diffuse panic and secure operations and assets during the coronavirus pandemic.

Pandemic Impacts HR issues

Whether employees are working at home or on-site, employers should be aware of various workplace and employment issues raised by COVID-19 mitigation efforts.

Global Demand Puts Pressure on Healthcare Supply Chains

In light of potential shortages and rising value of personal protective equipment (PPE), healthcare security professionals can take additional steps to protect these newly high-value items and shore up supply chain vulnerabilities.

Casino Resort Tactical Response Teams

How are casinos maintaining the softness required for guest services while simultaneously keeping up a tough front against an increasing number of public attacks?

The Rising Cost to Insure Security

The Rising Cost to Insure Security

A rash of large insurance claims in the United States has been reshaping the security insurance market, especially regarding security guards and guarding firms.

Tomando Vuelo

​En el condado rural de Grant, Washington, el personal de servicios públicos no sólo protege las subestaciones remotas: también ayuda a responder a los llamados de emergencia de la comunidad.

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