EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
The uncertainty caused by the coronavirus has forced businesses to become more innovative, agile, resilient and cyber-ready than ever before.
At the 10th annual Jerusalem Post Annual Conference, the CEO of cyber security company Check Point Software, Gil Shwed, shared insights into how to stay cyber safe in a dangerous world.
These insights are now available on CyberTalk.org so that you and your teams can benefit from them and thrive.
Heightened danger
“Before COVID, we ran our life 50/50 between the physical and cyber worlds,” stated Shwed. “During the pandemic, it became 90/10. Now it is about 80/20.”
The internet, and all that goes with it, is deeply intertwined within our lives. Hackers can seem inescapable and hacks inevitable.
In his talk, Shwed emphasized how the coronavirus pandemic remade the threat landscape, and how strategies, on both the attackers’ sides and among enterprises, have shifted.
“Because nearly everything that people consumed had to go online, companies shifted their infrastructure to the cloud, which is susceptible to cyber attacks,” he explained.
The pandemic also left hackers with plenty of time to sit at home and to design software that could attack the cloud infrastructure, Shwed elaborated.
And, consumers began to rely on an increasing number of digital devices, expanding attack surfaces (access points) that hackers can leverage to launch intrusions.
All of these factors combined have amplified cyber security challenges, and resulted in rethinking, new initiatives, and exploration of advanced cyber security solutions.
What’s next
“The challenge we have to solve for right now is much bigger than it was two years ago…” he said. And “the challenge two years ago was big enough.”
“At present, hackers are threatening national security, the water supply, and the energy supply…We’ve seen that in the past six months, the entire oil supply to the US shut down because of a cyber attack.”
Cyber security issues aren’t theoretical; they’re here and now.
The future is now
“Cyber threats are a threat to everything we’re doing”. The level of sophistication of among attackers is going up.
A few years ago, Gil Shwed coined the terms around generations of attacks. According to Shwed, most organizations are competently defending against third generation attacks.
However, newer and more sophisticated 5th generation attacks continue to imperil enterprises worldwide. Organizations need to “ramp up and deal with modern threats.”
Since the beginning of 2021, 5th generation attacks have become the norm and the vulnerability landscape has expanded exponentially.
For example, when bankers worked in physical banks, an attack could only have occurred within the building. But now, attackers can access the banking environments through a much broader array of access points. The same holds true for many people working across a variety of different types of organizations.
For the full set of Jerusalem Post conference insights from Gil Shwed, watch the interview footage here or see this article here.
To learn more about pressing issues in the cyber world, please join Gil Shwed at the premiere cyber security event of the year – CPX 360 2022. Register here.
