Interview: Check Point MD explains how Covid-19 opened the floodgates to cyber threats
| New Delhi |
December 24, 2020 6:12:12 pm
Deepfake videos will be used to spread misinformation in 2021 (Representational Image)
The Covid-19 pandemic has had a major impact on the way we do things whether it’s official or personal work. Offices had to squeeze years of developments in a few weeks or months to enable employees to work from remote locations. While people were adapting to the new normal of remote working, hackers and scammers were devising new ways to lay traps for the vulnerable people who were used to the IT department fixing everything for them.
We talked to the cybersecurity firm, Check Point Software Technologies about how the industry has evolved and whether they are poised to take on the challenges they will be facing in 2021. Sundar N Balasubramanian, Managing Director, India and SAARC, Check Point Software Technologies told indianexpress.com how the novel coronavirus forced drastic changes.
“According to a study, a staggering 87 per cent of companies plan to expedite their cloud migration in the post-pandemic world, and 68 per cent of companies are using two or more cloud providers as part of their migration efforts. The increased use of the cloud means an increased demand for security solutions, especially technologies that secure workloads, containers and serverless applications on multi and hybrid cloud environments. Organisations in India too are looking to leverage their security investments to protect their data” he said.
Misconfiguration opened up employees and companies to threats
Balasubramanian also talked about how the lack of “basic cyber hygiene” led to employees and companies getting exposed to threats. “Organisation’s security priorities related to IT have changed in response to the new normal. With the rush to enable remote access, companies allowed connectivity from unmanaged home PCs that often lacked basic cyber-hygiene. In addition, many Infosec and DevOps teams rushing to the cloud did not scale their cloud security postures to the level of their traditional data centers,” he said.
“According to our 2020 Cloud Security Report, the highest-ranking threat was misconfiguration, with 68 per cent of companies citing this as their greatest concern (up from 62 per cent from the previous year). Misconfiguration takes place when a cloud-related system, tool, or asset is not configured properly, thus endangering the system and exposing it to a potential attack or data leak. This threat was followed by unauthorized access (58 per cent), insecure interfaces (52 per cent), and account hijacking (50 per cent).”
