Bengaluru Tech Summit: We can win battle against the bad guys, says cyber security expert

BENGALURU: With staff working from home and high reliance on the cloud, leading cyber security expert Gil Shwed, CEO and co-founder of Check Point Software Technologies, believes the attack surface has greatly expanded. Now, it's imperative to have not just sophisticated security updated in real time, but also a robust cyber security policy, he said.

Talking at a fireside chat on Assuring Digital Trust: Cyber Security Imperatives in the New Normal with Vishal Salvi, CISO and head of Cyber Security, Infosys, at the Bengaluru Tech Summit, Shwed said the policy ought to be prevention by first keeping the attackers out and not about detection after it happens and remediation. It should also be multi vector i.e. addressing all areas of the system -- cloud, users, data centre, computers, iot, he added.

"Mobile devices maybe are the weakest link today. They see and hear us and our data and networks all the time. We are always connected to the public networks and hence we are the best backdoors to everything and yet less than 1 percent of companies secure their mobile devices," he said, noting that it was a shocking figure.

With this and consolidation, where the number of systems are minimised to ensure that all elements of the system work together, he said it is possible to fight and win against the bad guys, the hackers. Expounding on work from home and its impact, he believed the model would continue despite people returning to offices now, and hence a far more secure architecture to deal with threats is needed.

In a parallel conversation, Ashish Mishra, MD of Interbrand India who linked cyber security to branding, said just like climate change, cyber security has to be taken to citizens in a simplified and relatable form. He believed companies should acknowledge and own up to gaps, firstly, and follow it up with reassurances and lobbying to create insurances for damage control. Research, he said, points to top three brand strength factors -- trust, presence, and affinity -- which are crucial for driving value for brands.

Meanwhile, Thomas Leen, Global CISO of BHP, believed that the role of CISOs who protect the system and a whole lot of business is now also to demistify cyber risks to a group of executives who are not experts in that space -- translate it from cyber/tech language to how it impacts the business.