With an expanding attack surface, choosing the right security strategy becomes crucial

The threat landscape is constantly evolving. On the face of this, what continues to concern an organization is the question of when they are going to be attacked. Developing an incident response capability to identify and contain threats is indispensable for any organization. 

Combining cyber investigative services with incident response expertise and digital forensics is going to be critical to manage the growing complexity of modern cybersecurity incidents. In an ever-evolving threat landscape, a strong cyber incident response and forensic capability is what is becoming essentially important for businesses to stay ahead of their adversaries.

While many other developed nations demand that security breach of any kind be reported within 48 to 72 hours, CERT-In (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team), a central government body which collects all the information regarding what types of cyber-attacks are occurring, has set a highly aggressive deadline of 6 hours. The 6-hours window to report cybersecurity breaches as mandated by CERT-In is seen as a measure to put a check on the ever growing cyber-attacks.

Failure to follow the CERT-In Directions may result in up to a year in jail, a fine of up to INR 100,000, or both. It clearly states that if any organization is found that they willingly default in reporting, under the provisions of sub-section (7) of section 70B of the IT Act 2000, enunciates that “Any service provider, intermediaries, data centers, body corporate or person who fails to provide the information called for or comply with the direction under sub-section (6), shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year or with fine which may extend to one lakh rupees or with both.” 

Also, most of the organizations are in a state of confusion when it comes to Cybersecurity readiness; either they spend on wrong products or they keep on thinking which way to choose, before which they already get hit by a cyber attack. With a restricted budget, it really is a challenge for customers to choose the right product. It therefore becomes important to identify the available assets in the network, the vulnerabilities posed, protect those assets and remediate the vulnerabilities using tools or devices like Firewalls, patch management solutions etc.  

While a cyber attack of any scale is imminent in this age of Internet, let us hear from some of the CISOs and OEMs on what they think are the latest threats are and how should orgnizations raise their security level - 

 

 

Unsanctioned cloud application management continues to be a big challenge

Seema Sharma
Global CISO – Servify

Top Security Threats in 2023
“The biggest challenge in 2022 has been the misconfiguration of the security settings of the cloud services. This has compounded with the use of the multi-cloud environment. Because every cloud has vendor specific security controls which not all orgnizations are aware of.  Also not every organization has a matured cloud security posture management program. They even lack skilful resources who are aware of these controls. While configuring and securing their cloud workload, there could be some security oversights or misconfigurations. Plus the cloud can be vulnerable to lot of attacks. 

Secondly lot of cloud service providers provide APIs to their customers with the documentation that enables them to easily use those APIs. But these documentations can also be used by cyber criminals to identify and exploit the ways of accessing data from the cloud. In addition to that, with the industry shifting their applications towards micro-services based architecture, lot of services are running with lot of ports open and lot of API communications happening back and forth, these also increases the attack surface area. This also exposes the APIs to cyber criminals. 

Thirdly, data loss and data leakage are the biggest threats. This is the same this year as well where both insider and external threats are responsible. The root cause has been the users and programs accidentally deleting some sensitive data. The functionality in the cloud based storage solution which allows you to share data through links and get forwarded to unauthorised users or cyber criminals can be misused to launch cyber attacks.”

 

Cyber threats are evolving day by day

Ravinder Arora
Global CISO & DPO – Infogain

Top Security Threats in 2023
“The biggest challenge would be the rise in phishing attacks. What we are seeing in the last few years is cyber criminals are using new techniques, new ways of sending phishing mails, especially CXO and CFO level scams. Secondly, many organizations have either started or completed their journey to the Cloud. Now these hackers are targeting the sensitive data that is stored on the Cloud.  So the security of the Cloud has become even more important. Thirdly, with most of the organizations now working in a hybrid mode, so endpoint security systems are getting hacked very easily by hackers as they can get access to company networks. 

Raising the protection level of the organization 
Information security cannot be a blockade in business growth. The information security system department has to become a business enabler. And there is a very thin line. We have to tell the management what are the security risks are and look to mitigating these risks without compromising on the business growth. The most important part is the Top-down approach. Right from the top management to the employees, everyone should be made aware that information security is everyone’s responsibility, and not just the responsibility of the CISO. This is one approach that would benefit the organization as a whole.”

 

Training of employees is important to address in-house threats      

Bohitesh Misra
Co-Founder & CTO – Avexa Systems

Data Privacy & Security
“We are developing a connected healthcare analytics platform. This platform is going to be used by patients, hospitals, insurance companies. So the data becomes a very critical aspect of the whole security system. So I believe protecting the patient data is going to be a very critical aspect of the complete application. We are addressing all the concerns of data security and privacy with respect to healthcare data. So with this platform we are trying to ensure that data is secured for all our customers. 

Raising the protection level of the organization
What we believe is that all the data and security aspect is people driven. So we are ensuring that all our systems are protected with respect to Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) and other such tests.  We therefore ensure that all our devices are protected. However, we also try to train our people accordingly so that we are protected from in-house threats. With the recent development of ChatGPT and other vulnerabilities and malware discovered every day, we understand that hackers will be more advanced. It is therefore important to make people aware of the highest level of security threats from advanced technologies like these.  I believe that awareness is going to be key for successful implementation of security checks and balances.”

 

The workforce should adapt to the changing threat landscape

Kumar Ravi, 
CISO – Teleperformance India

Top Security Threats in 2023
“With the pandemic behind us and the Work From Home or the Hybrid working Model kicking in, the threat landscape has expanded multi-fold. Now every endpoint is like an entry point to the organization and that is how the attack surface is getting expanded. Talking about the threats that concern us the most, they are largely related to the malwares, the phishing attacks, because it is more of a distributed architecture now. It is no longer the castle and the moat approach. So malware, phishing, end-user priviledge management still continue to be the areas where the industry in general and the companies in particular need to focus on. With the companies now embarking on their cloud journey, even the datacenters have moved out. So the cloud is another avenue that needs to be taken care of very diligently.  

Raising the protection level of the organization

There is definitely a shortage of skilled resources in the cyber security space, not only because there are businesses that have taken their digital transformation journey ahead and hence the use of more digital technologies. It is also because of the evolving threat landscape. It is like the more avenues and platforms you have, the larger the battlefield. You definitely need to have the right skills with you and with the pace technology is changing, we need the workforce that can also adapt to the changing risk landscape.”

 

 

Ransomware going to be the top-notch cyber threat in 2023

Abhishek Kumar, 
CEO & Founder - Cyberconn 

Top Security Threats in 2023
“Ransomware is something which is going to grow manifold in the future. Every other company will be hit by a ransomware. Close to 78% of the organizations surveyed in a particular study admitted that they have been hit by a ransomware. Along with ransomware, ransomware-as-a service is also going to rise. Nowadays hackers are already providing this service and anybody can use this service by running an automated software. Ransomware is undoubtedly going to be the top-notch cyber threat. But along with that, data breach is also going to be another concern going forward. Very soon we are going to see a cyber army attacking business organizations just to stop our business growth in our country. So because of these data breaches a lot of data is going to be available online as we have seen with some recent hacks.  So ransomware and data breach are going to be the two imminent threats in the future.  

Raising the protection level of the organization
When a cyber attack happens or when a data breach happens, the company loses a lot of its value – the soft value and then the same day the customer sells their shares and the stock market comes down by millions of dollars if it is a very big company. So in order to grow, now the traditional cyber technologies are not enough. What we need is external security.”  

 

 

With progressive AI, human operated Ransomware is going to impact a lot of organizations

Smith Gonsalves, 
Director & Principal consultant, Cyber Smith Secure

Top Security Threats in 2023
"The way the area of threat landscape is evolving, AI is progressing and the tools like ChatGPT are coming in, I am not surprised to see a mature human operated Ransomware which is going to impact a lot of organizations and a drastic growth in mercenary hackers using human operated Ransomware created by the advanced persistent threat groups and then deliver or proliferate through these mercenary hackers. This complicated attack is going to increase and organizations who have a turnover of around Rs 100 crore to Rs 1000 crore are going to be the victim. On top of that there are issues that are going to be concerning like the spam emails and phishing campaigns, specifically business email compromisation which happens to be the key in terms of impersonating and targeting the CEOs and CFOs. Here their systems are going to be targeted to exfiltrate critical information or basically do a financial crime in the organization or target those individuals. On top of these attacks on the intellectual property especially on the data that is stored on the S3 or the blob storage is certainly going to be high.

Raising the protection level of the organization
When you have state-of-the-art cybersecurity tools, encourage the Indian startup ecosystem with tools like passwordless and zero trust which are basically going to ensure that when someone is attacking your infrastructure he is not going to see the common tactics or the common cyber security tools that are available. Instead he will see the zero trust approach that we in the organization are utilizing."

 

 

Ransomware and Malware continue to trend in 2023

Mohit Puri, 
Country Manager - India & SAARC - SonicWall

Top Security Threats in 2023 
"In the last two years while we were coming out of the pandemic, Ransomware and Malware are the top trends which have been causing havoc across the globe. So as we go along, this year I see these continuing in the same way because there are so many startups which are coming up nowadays and of course they are not very well equipped with the cybersecurity tools and their whole cybersecurity posture is not up to the mark. So, for the hackers they are very soft targets. So targeting them with Ransomware and Malware attacks is very common and this will be very prevalent in 2023.

Raising the protection level of the organization 
SonicWall is no longer a firewall company; we have end to end security whether endpoint security, email security, the new zero trust which is so much in demand nowadays. So, we are actually looking after the entire security posture of an organization. We now have controls, which can give end-to-end solutions while we grow and of course, we have so many customers wherein we started with firewall, and now we are upselling and cross-selling them with other security measures and that is ensuring us growth as we go along."