Friday, March 29, 2024

CXO Innovation Summit | Cybersecurity a continuing journey, says exec 

There is already a general understanding on the need for cybersecurity across all industries, Fortinet regional business development manager CP Wong said in an exclusive interview with Newsbytes.PH, following his presentation of the cybersecurity firm’s threat predictions for 2023 at the CXO Innovation Summit hosted by VST ECS in Boracay island, Aklan.  

Fortinet regional business development manager CP Wong

Across all its business segments and verticals, Fortinet is also seeing a growth in demand for its services, driven by the need of enterprise for a refresh of their security measures, the additional protection to support “work from anywhere” setups, and the requirement of organizations to consolidate and integrate their assets.  

“Security is not just about implementing products and solutions. It is equally important to have your processes and to have your people understand how to get all these things together. There’s a shortage of security expertise so MSSPs present economies of skills to pool the security expertise into that one provider and providing it out to various organizations,” Wong said.  

The new tone of Fortinet’s prediction for the threat landscape in 2023 is ubiquity – from the expansion of Crime-as-a-Service (CaaS) offered through the Dark Web, all the way to targeting the emerging world of the metaverse. The firm’s previous predictions saw a rise in attacks against operational technology (OT) and the strengthened efforts of cybercriminals on pre-attack activities.  

Beyond ransomware and malware, Fortinet predicts a significant sale of access to pre-compromised targets being offered by cybercriminals. These threat actors are expected to leverage new technologies like deepfakes and intelligence gathering to deliver more impact with their attacks.  

Machine learning is also set to be utilized by criminal organizations to automate their money laundering activities through recruitment targeting for their money mules – individuals who move financial assets for syndicates, as well as automated services through layers of crypto exchanges.  

As the concept of the metaverse continues to advance in both the consumer and enterprise realms, attackers will now target the user’s individual avatar — essentially a gateway to personally identifiable information, while digital finances and crypto wallets further expand the attack surface.  

Fortinet foresees a dramatic comeback for wiper malware which only highlights the gap of having speedy remediations. Experts have also begun warning against quantum day (Q-Day), a point in time where quantum computing will be powerful enough to break encryption mechanisms, urging the need for new encryption algorithms that can withstand quantum computers.  

“We have customers at various stages of adoption. The mature ones know exactly what it is going to be like while the less mature ones, or those who are starting up, require a little bit of coaching. I think every organization has their own process in terms of certifying a certain software version, not just for firewalls, but across the organization itself,” he explained.  

The best defense against cybercriminals, according to Fortinet, is to first understand the malicious actors themselves, as well as their motivations and their strategies. Another crucial safeguard is to have a single cybersecurity platform with tight integration to facilitate rapid, coordinated, and effective protection and response. 

“Every cloud provider has their own suite of services like cloud security and what have you, but we also see the market moving towards multi-cloud environment so the need to be able to ingest information from your various cloud platforms to a single pane of glass would be essential to help you manage your security posture and understand your risks,” Wong added.  

Fortinet recently launched a new addition to its next-generation firewalls. The FortiGate 1000F enables customers achieve more than seven times the performance of its competition and cut up to 83% in power consumption. This new offering is aimed at helping customers achieve sustainability goals without sacrificing performance and efficiency.   

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