Cyberattacks increasingly leverage AI for automation: Barracuda

Parag Khurana, Country Manager for India and SAARC at Barracuda Networks, on how to build a true cyber resilience strategy.

- By Praneeta | [e-mail]

AI-POWERED CYBERATTACKS are becoming more complex and evasive. This is the stark warning from Parag Khurana in his interview with CIO&Leader. As Country Manager for India and SAARC at Barracuda Networks, Khurana has spent three years scaling the company's business across the region. In this interview, he emphasizes that organizations must focus on both prevention and rapid response to build true cyber resilience.

Khurana outlines how 24/7 security platforms with automated responses can dramatically reduce detection and mitigation times. His recommendations for CIOs stem from his understanding that modern security requires “a different approach to security, one that combines multi-layered, defence-in-depth security solutions with a strong understanding of cyber risk and resilience.” Edited excerpts are below:

CIO&Leader: Which emerging cybersecurity and data protection trends do you foresee as most impactful in 2025?

PARAG KHURANA: Cyberattacks are increasingly complex and evasive. Over the coming year, we expect more attacks to leverage AI for automation and targeting as threat actors try to quickly and successfully infiltrate systems and spread laterally across IT environments, both on-premise and in the cloud, which has far-reaching implications for cybersecurity and data protection.

While incident prevention should remain the cornerstone of IT security strategies, organisations must also focus on incident detection, response and mitigation: how to spot, deal with and minimise the impact of attacks that breach the network. This is cyber resilience.