The swarm of cyber threats you have to protect against is complex and only getting more so

Like facing a swarm of mosquitos, South African business leaders are sounding the alarm about increasingly complex cybersecurity threats.

Mosquitos come in their thousands and can attack through a small opening to cause a fatal disease. Similar to mosquitos evolving against insecticides, cybersecurity threats are increasingly difficult for businesses to prevent and recover from

Global cyber-attacks against systems, applications, and personal networks have reached their highest level ever.

Increasingly complex cyber threats

Check work email on your personal phone? Check your banking records online? Participate in an online video call with colleagues to complete a project?

Then you are part of the technological transformation of daily lives and businesses, leveraging the trends of Bring Your Own Device, cloud, and collaboration.

Cisco recently conducted a study amongst future business leaders in South Africa to understand employee attitudes, behaviours and trends towards three of the key transitions which are enabling the IoE in South Africa today – workspace device management, the growth of business class video and cloud computing.

It showed that BYOD in South Africa continues to grow with nearly two-thirds (63%) of South African employees allowed to use their own devices to access the company server or network. Business-class video is already impacting organisation and career growth, with 7 in 10 respondents agreeing that business-class video will save travel costs and smooth out any issues related to telecommuting. And, cloud computing is seen as the next big step in the evolution of computing with over three-quarters of South African respondents familiar with cloud computing.

However, these trends are also driving increasingly complex cyber-attacks.

Blended cybersecurity threats — combining phishing, malware, and hacking — can remain undetected while stealing data or disrupting critical systems, like a mosquito sucking your blood without you noticing.

As businesses extend networks to partners and rely on ISPs and hosting companies, cyber criminals are launching attacks via Internet infrastructure. A company’s website becomes the “patient zero” – the initial case of a syndrome – as both the malware repository and redirector.

Malware is set to feast on mobile apps, which are increasingly impacting every part of our daily lives – but are also putting businesses at risk. Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of employees across South Africa do not understand the security risks of using personal devices in the workplace. It is therefore important for businesses to educate their employees on these risks.

New kinds of defence

It can be easy for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) to feel overwhelmed by the task of protecting terabytes of information across a more complex and porous network, in the face of shrinking IT budgets and leaner IT teams.

Just as mosquitos evolve and become immune to pesticides over time, malware also evolves and becomes resistant to basic defence techniques. Businesses need to deploy new defense techniques based on three key points:

• Visibility across extended networks, with contextual awareness to identify and stop cybersecurity threats.
• Continuous and real-time analysis of threat intelligence across all products, leveraging global threat intelligence, that can stop and minimise threats.
• Integrated system of agile and open platforms that cover the network, devices, and cloud, for centralised monitoring and management.

Image: sean dreilinger via Flickr.