The growing complexities of the IT landscape and sophistication of cyber-attacks across the globe are compelling enterprises to adopt in-depth defence strategies to protect their systems and digital assets.
“Every region is different,” said Ben Johnson, Chief Security Strategist, Carbon Black, “but certainly, all the [cyber] attacks around the world are increasing. They’re getting a lot more difficult to detect and fend-off.
“What we’re also seeing is that a lot of threat actors are collaborating and exchanging techniques, which is very alarming,” he said.
In light of this issue, Johnson placed the spotlight on latest survey conducted by Carbon Black showed that about 66 percent of CIOs in the UAE are facing enormous pressure to implement more effective solutions to successfully prevent, detect and quickly respond to harmful cyber-attacks.
Carbon Black released the results to underscore the significance of swiftly addressing online security breaches after 71 percent of those surveyed revealed that it takes them one to two weeks to uncover costly intrusions to their networks.
Johnson then highlighted that one of the main problems that the IT security industry is facing today is the shortage of skills and talents. He explained that automation is one of the key things organisations can look into to improve their cyber defences. “With automation, enterprises can create a ‘playbook’ or a strategic set of procedure where they can monitor different kinds of triggers or threat elements that can potentially affect their networks. This enables organisations to address issues on talent shortage, however, it does require them to look for different skillsets. They would need people who are adept in skills like software engineering and coding.”
Further into the survey, Johnson underlined that surprisingly, CIOs in the Middle East region are lagging behind when it comes to implementing network defences like anti-virus as compared to IT leaders in countries like the UK (only 15 percent of the surveyed CIOs in the Middle East have anti-virus compared to 90 percent of CIOs in the UK). “What they should understand is that buying the latest technologies and connecting it their systems does not necessarily mean that they’re already protected,” said Johnson. “They need to deploy products and solutions that complement their systems and addresses their specific needs.
“It has never been an effective strategy to wait for hackers to make a mistake and expose themselves before your network security team acts on it,” he said. “Just like the attackers, an organisation’s team must be equally, if not more, determined, sophisticated, and well-funded. We know for a fact that many security teams are still unable to prioritise threats because of the huge volume of alerts they receive. Companies need to automate processes where possible to enable their security teams to counter threats and paralyse hackers during an attack, rather than just picking up the pieces in the aftermath of the attack.”
