Cyberattacks: A question of when it will happen, not if

Dubai - During Covid-19, organisations were faced with a massive drive towards digitisation.

Security has to be a key factor on the agenda of every financial institution, said Anil Titus, manager – Sales Engineering (META) at Commvault.

Speaking at the Digibank 2021 forum in Dubai, he highlighted how, during Covid-19, organisations were faced with a “massive drive towards digitisation”.

Data, he explained, is at the heart of all this digitisation. “Data volumes started to grow and an interesting thing happened; your data left the security of your data centre and it travelled to your employee’s home. This caused an increase in the number of attack surfaces that malicious actors can use to target you. So now, in comes a massive wave of ransomware attacks — in some cases we saw a 400 per cent increase in such attacks.”

Malicious actors, he said, have even started to pay employees to plant malware and ransomware in these data centre. “We started analysing what could be done, and we realised that it is not a case of if we get hit with ransomware, but a question of when we get hit. The focus has shifted from preventing the attack, to how a company can withstand the attack.”

In addition, he highlighted how banks have increasingly started to look into subscribing to cloud services. “Previously, this was a challenge because of data sovereignty issues; your data could not leave the confines of the region you were operating in. But, all of this has changed with international tech companies such as Microsoft coming into the region and opening their data centres. This has initiated a higher adoption of public cloud services.”

While this move has been welcomed by companies across the industry, it has also brought about a new set of challenges, Titus said. “Your challenges now went away from managing physical infrastructure to looking more at the way your data is stored and protected. This is a big change that is impacting all businesses in the region.”

— rohma@khaleejtimes.com