Gitex 2021: Cybersecurity tops agenda for smart cities

Cybersecurity will continue to remain a challenge for organisations unless they heavily invest in security protocols that take into account the needs of both businesses and customers in a smart city, experts at Gitex Technology Week 2021 said.

Mahmoud Samy, VP for EMEA Emerging Region at Forcepoint, explained that the physical disruptions to working patterns caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has meant that businesses had to move to remote working systems almost overnight. Since then, cybersecurity teams have had to scramble to secure the evolving hybrid workforces and ever-expanding SaaS applications in a manner that doesn’t hinder work processes – and the solution has been to move workloads to the cloud.

“Data is the building block of today’s digitized economy,” he said. “In today’s reality where people are working from everywhere, progressive organisations must address the protection of precious information assets in a perimeter-less networking environments. Data-first SASE ensures organisations can secure data access and usage, by closing down attacks and opening up data use.”

Ransomware, he added, continues to make headlines. “Sadly, there is a thriving industry in ‘ransomware as a service’. While this business exists, malware developers can continue to create new ransomware variants, while the delivery of malware is outsourced to different criminal entities who pay for access to the latest builds. In this way, a ‘standard’ cybercriminal can gain access to relatively sophisticated malware, even if the techniques for delivery stay the same.”

Gordon Love, VP of MEA Sales at Mandiant, also agreed that the biggest challenge for businesses today is the threat of ransomware, which has evolved over the past couple of years. Mandiant has adopted the term “multifaceted extortion” to characterize this evolved form of ransomware. The many facets of this attack include deployment of data encryptors, theft of proprietary and sensitive data, public shaming using the stolen data and other additional coercive tactics.

Attackers have become much more sophisticated in their attacks but, more importantly, so have the defenders, he said. According to Mandiant’s mTrends 2021 report, global median dwell time dropped below a month for the first time. Organisations are now detecting incidents in only 24 days – more than twice as fast as they did in 2019.

“Cyber actors have evolved their tactics, techniques and procedures,” he said. “We are now seeing adversaries leveraging exploits more often than other vectors. For example, in 29 per cent of cases, more than one distinct threat group was identified in the victim environment –nearly twice the percentage noted in 2019, proving that actors are sharing collaborating and sharing resources. In more than half of the intrusions investigated in 2020, we observed that adversaries used obfuscation, such as encryption or encoding, on files or information to make detection and subsequent analysis more difficult.”

rohma@khaleejtimes.com