Gullapalli suggests holistic way for looking at threats and attacks
Cybersecurity is getting very complex especially in today’s evolving threat landscape with increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, which in some cases is hard to understand and keep up with, says Vivek Gullapalli, Chief Information Security Officer, APAC at Check Point Software Technologies from Tel Aviv.
Citing a company report, he pointed out that an organization in India was being attacked on average 2,157 times per week in the last 6 months, compared to 1,139 attacks per organization globally.
Fifty per cent of the malicious files in India were delivered via Web in the last 30 days and the most common vulnerability exploit type in India is Remote Code Execution, impacting 61% of the organizations, according to the Check Point’s Threat Intelligence Report on India.
The report also revealed that the 3 most impacted industries in the last 6 months in terms of weekly attacks per organization were in healthcare, followed by education/research and then by utilities.
India’s healthcare sector suffered 4,870 weekly attacks in the last 6 months as opposed to 1,484 globally, calling this sector in to the spotlight for its increased series of attacks, continuing on from last year.
Gullapalli explained that post-COVID, hospitals in India and generally across the world, were forced into accelerated digital transformation, with a focus on a zero-touch approach as opposed to paper-based previously.
However, these digital implementations were carried out without a security first approach, leading them to suffer security gaps, and sealing their current security weaknesses.
“Very often cybersecurity is mainly left to the responsibility of a company IT team to manage,” he said, calling for involvement of the board and management to make sure that the organization is able to survive cyberattack and continue doing business uninterrupted.
Speaking at the Singapore International Cyber Week held Oct 17-19, 2023, Gullapalli suggests a holistic way for looking at threats and attacks rather than to delegate to an IT person. “You need to understand the business, the ecosystem and who is coming after you, and work with the board and management to implement a prevention-first cybersecurity strategy for maximum cyber resiliency.”
Israel-based Check Point Software Technologies Ltd is a leading provider of cyber security solutions to corporate enterprises and governments globally. The 30-year-old Check Point’s products and services are sold to enterprises, service providers, small- and medium-sized businesses and consumers. We secure more than 100,000 businesses and millions of users worldwide. Fiinews.com
