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Recent global events have shown that innovation is essential for enterprises to survive and flourish. But accelerating digital innovation brings new complexity and risk. In the current scenario, let’s analyze how organizations can anticipate new cyber-security threats, deal with disruptive technologies and build resilience in a world where anything seems possible
In the aftermath of the pandemic, as boundaries between remote workplaces and offices have eroded, cyber attackers are discovering new ways to intrude and misuse sensitive data, both personal and corporate. Concurrently, while automation and digitization have presented infinite growth opportunities, they have also widened the technological surface for cyber-attackers to exploit.
More than 11.5 lakh incidents of cyber-attacks were tracked and reported to India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) in 2021. According to official estimates, ransomware attacks have increased by 120 percent in India. Power companies, oil and gas majors, telecom vendors, restaurant chains and even diagnostic labs have been victims of cyber-attacks.
Pandemic silver lining
Every crisis has a silver lining and for the pandemic, it has been the accelerated adoption of digital solutions across enterprises and governments. Decade’s worth of digital transformation has taken place in the last two years and India’s technology industry has emerged as the preferred digital solutions partner with cyber security as a key growth vertical. Cyber security is now a boardroom agenda and offers tremendous opportunities for India’s tech industry to build innovative solutions and services.
This boardroom focus has enabled India’s cyber security industry to nearly double in size amid the pandemic, with revenues from cyber security products and services growing from $5.04 billion in 2019 to $9.85 billion in 2021, according to Data Security Council of India report. The services industry grew from $4.3 billion in 2019 to $8.48 billion in 2021 at a CAGR of 40.33 percent. The product industry grew from $740 million in 2019 to reach $1.37 billion in 2021 at a CAGR of 36.49 percent.
At the same time, India’s cyber security workforce swelled from 110,000 employees in 2019 to 218,000 in 2021 even as talent shortages remain. India’s cyber security startup and product industry also saw robust growth, raking in revenues worth $1.37 billion.
Biggest factor to halt organizational growth, profitability
Cyber security has remained among the top five factors which impact the growth for the CEOs around the world shares Akhilesh Tuteja, Global Leader – Cyber Security, KPMG. “Global CEOs and CFOs have highlighted that cyber security is the largest factor which could halt the growth and profitability of the organizations. As per our global survey, two-third of the global CEOs say that robust cyber security makes them feel stronger, confident, and enable them exploit more power of digital.”
He further underlined that CISOs are not just reducing risk but are actually creating humongous value for the organizations. “In fact, the role of CISO is getting quite hard due to scarcity of skilled resources and cyber security being highly technical job requiring deep expertise. Indeed, there is large demand and supply gap in skilled resources in cyber security, which leads to overburden and stress among the security personnel. Hence, CISOs and security experts deserve high level of respect.”
With several recent incidents of data breach, India’s cyber security market so far proves the robust demand. But is the country ready to meet this demand and is it preparing a cyber-security workforce for the unforeseen cyber future? Around 3.5 million jobs in the cyber security space was estimated to be unfilled by the end of 2021.
Driving C-suite and board agenda
Setting the tone for the board room agenda on how to get the ‘buy-in’ from the CEO and the board to invest in the resources required for a robust cyber security, Steven Sim Kok Leong, President, ISACA Singapore Chapter & Chair, OT-ISAC Executive Committee underlines that boards need to understand the limitations of paying ransom and using cyber insurance as means of risk transfer. “With lots of exclusion clauses, complications in claims, and dismal claim settlement ratio, cyber insurance is not a great idea for risk aversion. Moreover, paying ransom could be a disaster as the organization may turn out to be an excellent value proposition and lucrative customer for cyber attackers with repeated invasions. Further, decryption tools offered in exchange of ransom usually turn out to be sub-optimal. Hence, robust cyber security governance and disaster recovery strategy are still the preferred risk-driven approach.”
He adds that there is a need to invest heavily in operational and business resilience, business continuity, incident management and recovery measures. “CISOs need to discuss the business impact in terms of revenue loss, reputation loss, and regulatory fines that follow after the security breach. Above all, we need to assess the competitive advantage which comes as we showcase resilient-by-design architecture to the potential customers. Digital trust is crucial in the current scenario.”
Elaborating on how enterprises can strike a balance between financial viability of security spending and having the optimum security infrastructure, Dr. Rizwan Khan, CFO-CIO, Panoval Asia mentions that security starts from top of the pyramid. “Top management must be aware of the significance and importance of cyber security. In addition, managers must be trained to respond to security incidents and most importantly, employees including team working on data must be sensitized, trained and be aware of whom to contact in case of any incident.”
He further underlined that the challenge CISOs face is to justify the RoI in security spending. “We could look at it from the perspective of importance of data that need to be protected. So we may argue that the spending on security will be justified by the value of the data that we may lose or may be jeopardized.”
Disruptive Deep Tech to Protect from Advance Cyber Threats
The security battle is getting intense by the day. Attackers are now state sponsored and leverage on emerging technologies like AI and automation. “Attackers are always one step ahead. They are coming up with newer ways of intrusion which pulls the security teams into vicious cycle of attack and protection. If we truly want to defend against the new types of threats, we need to completely and drastically change the way we think,” says Erez Kaplan, Founder & CTO, Cyber 2.0.
He adds that chaos mathematics could be the way out. “Let’s take our body for example. Our white blood cells and antibodies learn and act against the viruses and bacteria. However, viruses mutate and bypass our protection shield. If we put chaos mathematics on the communication between the cells, we will be able to block the communication between cells as the first cell gets infected. The attackers will be unable to bypass because the chaos mathematics is not crackable.”
Endpoint Security: Security from Home to the Enterprise
According to market estimates, over 36 percent of the employees find ways to bypass organizational security policies. “The need is to understand why do people adopt risky behaviors and try to bypass security policies. If we get into the root-cause analysis, we identify that employees engage in risky behavior for their convenience, which is more important for them as compared to the security controls,” shares Mohit Gupta, Group CISO, Motherson Group.
Hence, it is important to adopt technology and cyber security controls, but it is more crucial to evaluate and implement technology in such a way that strikes the right balance between convenience and security controls. “Picking a right technology is just one aspect of it. But how effectively, efficiently and smartly we implement the technology is something which is of utmost importance,” Gupta adds.
He further highlights that emerging cyber security solutions are certainly important, however, it is crucial to focus on four core principle of cyber security to strengthen our cyber security posture. “The first principle is security by default, which is a cultural change to incorporate security in the solution planning itself. The second is defense in depth. The third principle is that the solution or technology that we adapt should be scalable and agile. And the last important core principle is resilience by design. It is important how we position the business to elevate the brand equity if something goes wrong, and gain and sustain the stakeholder’s confidence. I guess that is where the answer towards cyber resiliency lies.”
OT & IT Convergence: Security with Zero Trust
Most OT systems have been designed with very little consideration for security. With increased cyber risk in this new digital transformation era, any approach to bridge the IT and OT divide is mission-critical for enterprise security. While a ‘zero-trust’ approach has proved to be successful for most organizations in an IT environment, how does it work in an OT setup?
“Organizations which are using Operational Technology extensively have seen value in terms of converging both OT and IT together to fuel the mass digitalization wave. We have seen that IT systems support data-centric computing on the other hand OT systems help in monitoring and controlling device performance. However, we have seen fair bit of cyber-attacks on IT and OT systems as the threat vectors are getting more sophisticated. In this perspective, a relook at zero trust framework is necessary to bring in the security control to protect the convergence of IT and OT,” states Akshay Garkel, Partner & Leader, Cyber, Grant Thornton Bharat.
The way IT systems have grown could not be seen in the OT systems, which are mostly running on legacy operating systems. In addition, all the policies designed for the IT systems could not be applied to OT systems which shortens the visibility. “While businesses are rapidly driving digital transformation initiatives, they need to ensure the cyber security is integral part of the journey. Most importantly, organizations must strengthen their zero trust approach by taking little steps into that journey. Zero trust is a multi-year project which is driven by cultural changes in the organization. Further, we need to ensure an air gap between IT and OT architecture,” highlights Ambarish Kumar Singh, CISO, Godrej & Boyce.
Col (Dr.) Inderjeet Singh, Chief Cyber Security Officer, Vara Technology adds that almost 85 percent of the traffic is not monitored by the firewalls and other security appliances. OT systems are quite difficult to secure as the air gaps are difficult to maintain. Further, IoT devices are connected to cloud which increases the vulnerabilities. Citing an example of cyber security controls in connected cars and smart manufacturing processes, he says that connected cars and driver-less cars have over 7200 embedded micro-controllers running millions of ports as all the controls are controlled by hundreds of sensors. To make it more interactive they have vehicle to vehicle communication and vehicle to infrastructure communication, which are highly vulnerable. Hence, complete understanding of the attack surface is critical.
“Lots of auditing and privacy controls are to be built in to check any vulnerability. In fact, the car has to be treated as the moving data center, which has to have restricted access,” adds Singh.
Highlighting the process and mindset changes, Nitin Parashar, Senior Manager, Security and Compliance, Jio Platforms reminds that zero trust is all about a mindset and process that we need to inculcate to prevent data breaches and contain lateral movement using application micro segmentation. “We need to be capable of expanding security protection across multiple computing devices, containerized environments independent of underlying infrastructure. In addition, we need to have complete visibility through users, devices, components and workloads across environments. Continuous threat detection is very important coupled with consistent user experience.”
Securing the future of work with cyber AI
Cyber-AI has been there for quite some time and organizations have already started leveraging it in an excessively big way. There are AI-based engines with ML algorithms which study the entire behavior of endpoint, baseline and detect what is a good behavior and normal behavior of an endpoint or a user. If it finds anything beyond normal, that’s where AI picks up and starts acting on it with some automation rules to take some action against it; it could be in the form of alerting, threat hunting, or blocking an asset.
“However, I think there would not be a state of autonomous cyber security ever because even the hackers while defining AI and ML towards security attacks, it is not autonomous by themselves,” says Dilip Panjwani, Principal Director, CISO & IT Controller, Larsen and Toubro Infotech. “There are self-healing networks that you can define, but they depend on what kind of attacks you have emphasized as part of your threat risk assessment at an organizational level and then deploy them towards first machine learning to baseline the patterns. Second, AI-based actions are defined to understand how you react to such situations and then bring in automation and integration across your IT infrastructure and information security,” he adds.
As a best practice, Panjwani highlights that businesses should perform red team assessment and cyber-breach assessments, both from the external attack service perspective as well as insider threat perspective. “This is crucial to identify your weak areas from people, process and technology perspective. The idea is to find out how to plug them over a period and ensure that you keep on improving over time. Another aspect is ensuring how you behave in a security incident. Considering that you’ve already been breached, you need to perform tabletop drills at an organization level to see how all the stakeholders within information security, IT and all other departments and leadership respond to such an attack, and how will they really work as a single team to attend and mitigate that incident.”
Vision for Security and Risk Management 2022
Akshay Garkel, Partner & Leader, Cyber, Grant Thornton Bharat states that supply chain security is going to be the way forward as it is crucial to understand the data flows, threats and profiling. “Organization’s security is as strong as the weakest chain. And in majority of the cases people are the weakest link. Hence, people awareness and skill levels are crucial to avert any insider threat. Zero Trust is becoming popular among enterprises, however, we must note that it’s not a product; it’s a concept or a thought process to invoke a culture across the organization. Hence, organizations need to realign their processes to match global standards which calls for increased priority for budget and resource allocation towards risk prevention.”
While the future is unclear and we don’t have much clarity around how the pandemic will play out. Hence, the focus must be on the basics. One should assess the resilience of the infrastructure, make sure that devices are properly configured and there should be clarity around what we are trying to defend. We should give a solid platform so that the business can pivot in whichever direction they can, but with a secure foundation.
Jaspreet Singh, Partner and National Leader, Client & Markets (Trust and Transformation), Grant Thornton Bharat seconds that the entire decade of 2020 will be focused on digital trust. “In comparison to the scenario two years back when businesses were still deliberating on their move to cloud, organizations are already working on their strategy on cloud and cloud security. Organizations need to draw a clear roadmap from the current and future perspective. This push will ensure that cyber security will be the part of the discussion during the board meetings and all the business initiatives.”
