In an interaction with ET Telecom's Danish Khan, Sundar N Balasubramanian, Managing Director, India and SAARC said that securing telecom networks<\/a> has become more complex as networks continue to evolve. He said securing IoT within an organisational environment will be challenging for telcos because traditional security controls provide only limited effectiveness.
During the current landscape, how do you see security challenges that organizations are facing as they shift to a work-from-home environment?
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The entire shift from working on premise to working from home has necessitated many changes in security postures of organizations. While many countries across the world have mandated nationwide lockdowns, organizations have transitioned to employees working from home and accessing corporate resources through secure access. This transition has accelerated the shift to cloud for industries across verticals. However, at the same time organizations had to restructure their network and security fabrics overnight, resulting in security gaps and new opportunities for cyber criminals.
The rush to enable remote access led to many companies allowing connectivity from unmanaged home PCs that lacked basic cyber-hygiene such as updated software patches, anti-malware etc. In addition to this, many Infosec and DevOps teams rushing to the cloud did not scale their cloud security environment to the level of their traditional data centers. Today’s reality is that organizations also need to ensure that employees' living rooms are also a part of the security perimeter. The “new normal” requires organizations to revisit and check the security level and relevance of their network’s infrastructures, processes, compliance of connected mobile and PC devices, IoT etc. The increased use of the cloud means an increased level of security, especially in technologies that secure workloads, containers and serverless applications on multi and hybrid cloud environments.
What are the trends in the last six months when it comes to cyberattacks? How have they evolved?
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In the past six months, the way we live, and work has changed beyond recognition. Our ’Cyber Attack Trends: 2020 Mid-Year Report’ shows how threat actors have exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to target organizations across all sectors, including governments, various industries, critical infrastructure, and consumers. Ever since the outbreak, COVID-19 related phishing and malware attacks increased dramatically. Data suggests the number of attacks increased from under 5,000 thousand per week in February, to over 200,000 per week in late April.
If we specifically look at mobile and cloud security, we are seeing two very clear trends. From a mobile perspective, cybercriminals are deploying innovative methods and new mobile infection vectors, and improved techniques to bypass security protections to place malicious apps in official application stores. At the same time the rapid move to public clouds during the pandemic is leading to an increase in attacks targeting sensitive cloud workloads and data. Threat actors are also using cloud infrastructure to store the malicious payloads in their malware attacks.
During these times what is your piece of advice for information security heads?
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Adopt real time prevention rather than just adopt a detection approach: Vaccination is better than treatment – even when it comes to cyber security. Real-time prevention of threats, before they can infiltrate the network, is the key to blocking future attacks.
Secondly, the “new normal” requires organizations to revisit and check the security level and relevance of their network’s infrastructures, processes, compliance of connected mobile and PC devices, IoT etc. The increased use of the cloud means an increased level of security, especially in technologies that secure workloads, containers and serverless applications on multi and hybrid cloud environments.
Many changes in the company’s infrastructure present a unique opportunity to check security investments. The highest level of visibility, reached through consolidation, will guarantee the best effectiveness.
A lot of citizen centric public services are being introduced through mobile devices. What is your perspective on mobile security?<\/strong>
Mobile threats are increasing in quantity and sophistication. According to Check Point’s Threat Intelligence Report, 11% of organizations in India have been impacted by mobile malware as compared to the global figure of 4.5% on a weekly basis.
With citizen services, there are two key things to consider: information confidentiality and minimal downtime of services. Organizations in the public sector need to ensure that they have the right cybersecurity solutions in place to ensure that citizens’ vital information are stored securely, and that their online and mobile service offerings are protected against attacks that would result in downtime.
At the same time, mobile device users need to take the necessary precautions to protect their device. They should always keep their phone operating system and apps updated, and never download apps from third party sources or click on suspicious links. SandBlast Mobile keeps mobile devices safe from cyber attacks through extensive threat detection and mitigation. Its unique, on-device network protection technology includes various features such as anti-phishing, safe browsing, anti-bot and conditional access capabilities.
Lately, we have observed that every business is a mobile business. Using smartphones and tablets to access critical services while on the go has many benefits but can also expose sensitive data to risk.
We are beginning to see first SMS phishing messages regarding COVID-19, hit mobile users as well. Which stresses the need for organizations to secure mobile devices with immediate threat removal and real-time intelligence that extends the existing security and mobility infrastructures.
What are your views on network security, how secure are today's telecom networks?
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As the world becomes more connected and networks continue to evolve, securing telecom networks has also become more complex. Today, from simple voice calls to text and email, all the way to streaming video—the traffic mix and bandwidth requirements change daily. We believe that a large telecom network must be able to secure a growing attack surface with traffic entering the network from handsets, the Internet, and point-to-point vendor connections.
With India planning to launch 5G in the near future, we see the country becoming hyper-connected where real-time applications will traverse the 5G networks. Securing IoT within an organisational environment will be challenging because traditional security controls provide only limited effectiveness.
5G will change the way we work and live, as well as the number of devices we have. There could even be more devices than human beings and the vastly increased numbers of devices will mean many more 5G security threats and a broader, multifaceted attack surface.
In addition, 5G technology<\/a> uses cloud and NFV as part of its core technology. Because of their open, flexible, programmable nature, as well as their elevated use, SDN<\/a> and NFV will open up a new avenue of security threats.
According to you where does India stand from a cyber security standpoint and where does India stand in Check Point’s global scheme of things?
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According to our analysis, an organization in India is being attacked on average 1189 times per week in the last 6 months, compared to 465 attacks per organization globally. Today, cybersecurity cannot be reactive or incident driven rather there has to be a proactive focus towards security. Organizations in India need to close security gaps and secure their networks, from employees’ home PCs and mobiles to the enterprise data center, with a holistic, end-to-end security architecture. But if we look at the overall trends, these priorities are essential for organizations across the world. The big enterprises that we speak to in India are not very different from those in other parts of the world. Some are more advanced, some are behind in terms of the level of security.
India is amongst the top 10 countries for us and the largest in the Asia region. India is also home to one of the four technical support centres the company has globally. The three other centres are located in the US, Canada, and Israel.
Can you tell us about your key customers in India and how are you supporting them?
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We secure more than 100,000 organizations and millions of users worldwide, including 96% of Fortune 100 companies and 85% of Fortune 500 companies. In India, we provide cyber security solutions to support state data centers and India’s Smart Cities. We are also focused on the energy, utility, oil, and gas verticals for IoT and SCADA as well as airports for emerging technologies like mobile and cloud. Additionally, we have a presence in India’s top 8 cities namely- Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Chennai & Hyderabad and our key verticals include BFSI, Telecom, IT & ITES, manufacturing, pharma, new tech and more.
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