OVERCOMING THE CYBER-PANDEMIC

ABHIJIT MAHADIK, DIRECTOR, CYBERSECURITY & INFRASTRUCTURE – UAE & KSA, RAQMIYAT SPEAKS TO SAME ABOUT THE EVOLVING CYBERSECURITY LANDSCAPE, THE THREATS ORGANISATIONS NEED TO WATCH OUT FOR AND HOW THE SECURITY PRIORITIES OF ORGANISATIONS HAVE SHIFTED SINCE THE PANDEMIC LAST YEAR.

- ABHIJIT MAHADIK

At the outset, let me share with you a statement that clouds my mind.

Isn’t the cybersecurity market overcrowded already? Yet there is an ever-increasing influx! This brings me to another question: If so, then why are perpetrators always ahead of the game?

‘Attacks against remote access protocols in the UAE reached 15.8 million in 2020,’ according to a report by global cybersecurity company, Kaspersky.

Let me give you another outlook- today, 90% of cybersecurity professionals in the US and Japan anticipate malicious AI-powered attacks. This is because AI research is publicly available and it can be used to build intelligent, continuously learning exploits by attackers. In adversarial attacks, attackers even change the inputs of machine learning models to cause the model to make mistakes. Even if we all tend to agree that it’s not a human scale problem anymore, how may we box the billions of data bits and time-varying signals sent from all corners? While new layers and surfaces both horizontally and vertically keep getting added to the organisation’s tech processes, a recent survey showed that while 85% of CISO’s prime objective is protection from ‘unknown’ adversarial attacks, 76% are also wary of regulatory non-conformities, 72% are grappling with cybercrimes and frauds too.

Tell us about the cyberattack landscape in the Middle East right now. What should we be worried about?