Cyber Resilience with Zero-Trust Approach is the need of the hour: CDS 2022

In the day-long summit (6th edition of Cyber & Data Security Summit 2022) held over the virtual discussion, organised jointly by VARINDIA and several technology giants’ starting from VMware, IBM, Lastpass, Fortinet, AMD, Hitachi Vantara, Check Point, Sophos and InstaSafe, along technology partners Ingram Micro, Techdata, iValue and Softcell industry leaders came together to address the vital need of cyber resilience, the cooperative approach enterprises need to adopt, and discussed on the theme, on how to mitigate fraud in a digital world. Cyber security remains one of the most extensively discussed subjects in the present era of unprecedented uncertainty.

The CDS 2022 was attended by the industry stalwarts Lt. Gen. Dr. S.P. Kochhar, Director General- COAI; Dr. Praveen Kumar Khosla, Executive Director- CDAC, Major Gen. Dilawar Singh- Ex-Indian Army; Prof. Triveni Singh, S.P- Cyber Crime U.P. Police; Sanjay Sahay, Ex IPS, Founder & Director TechConPro Pvt Ltd; Dr. Pavan Duggal, Founder & Chairman of International Comm.; Dr. Harold D'costa, CEO-Intelligent Quotient; Harnath Babu, Partner & CIO- KPMG India; Lata Singh, Director-I Regional Technology Sales Leader- India & South Asia- IBM India; Vinay Bhat, Director-Networking and Security-VMware India; Jayant Gundewar, Executive Director - Value Solution Business Ingram Micro; Shrinivas Patankar, Chief Security Consultant- Softcell Technologies; Ravindra Baviskar, Director - Sales Engineering (India & SAARC)-Sophos Technologies; Manmohan Brahma, Solutions Architect Lead, Data Center Solution Sales- AMD India; Ratnesh Chandra, Chief Technology Officer- Punjab & Sind Bank; Radhesh Walwadkar, Manager- Systems Engineering (Enhanced Tech), India & SAARC- Fortinet; Prakash Bell, Head- Security Engineering, India and SAARC- Check Point Software; Vikas Malhotra, Country Manager-LastPass; Sandip Kumar Panda, Founder & CEO-Instasafe; Sudharsan Aravamuthan, APAC Solution Lead- Data Intelligence & Content Solutions-Hitachi Vantara; Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Chief-in-Editor, VARINDIA and S Mohini Ratna, Group Editor- Kalinga Digital Media were present.

As the world continues to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, with the advent of widespread digitalization and steady migration towards cloud infrastructures, new security vulnerabilities are constantly introduced. Hybrid workplaces have become the new norm, resulting in employees who are likely to indulge in forms of insecure cyber behaviour due to a lack of or reduced supervision. The use of personal devices instead of corporate-issued machines, as an example, can lead to the accidental breach of sensitive data.

Understanding the importance of a strong cyber resilient culture to protect invaluable data, maintain company reputation, and promote business growth, the daylong event was addressed on 11th February 2022, by 40 expert speakers from Senior police officials, Defence, Lawyers, Industry leaders, corporate world, along with some of the industry’s prominent security experts has attended the Annual Cyber & Data Security Summit 2022.

The event started with the welcome speech by Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Editor-in-chief- VARINDIA. Welcoming everyone, Deepak said, “Our world is becoming more digitized and interconnected every day bringing different opportunities. Thanks to the accelerating rate of technological advancements with the rapid rate of digitization has led to the emergence of data security concerns and the corresponding science of cybersecurity.

As remote working proliferates and hackers test our perimeter defenses in more sophisticated ways, enterprise systems and data are more vulnerable than ever before. For CIO/CTO and CISOs, it’s time to stop reacting and start anticipating.” 

Log4j- an unauthenticated remote code execution

Sandip Kumar Panda  
Founder & CEO – Instasafe 

“The digital transformation which the companies tried to make for the last two decades was finally accentuated and achieved by COVID. It is a very different sort of a factor which brought us into a situation where the physical world finally got restricted to our particular rooms and houses given the pandemic situation. We stressed out into the online world, to fulfill all our requirements, may it be education, may it be your job, entertainment, interacting with your friends and family to the extent that even marriages, birthdays, everything started happening in the digital world.”

The series of professional services begin with assessment

Santanu Bhaumik   
Head, Professional Services, Ingram Micro    

 “The overall gamut of professional services starts from assessment. We provide the pre-sales services, design, the bill of material, proof of concept and all those associated services. We provide deployment services, managed and support services, training and education services, IT Asset disposal and other services.”

The cybersecurity structure is preventive, detective and mitigated

Niloy Biswas 
Head, Cybersecurity Practice, Ingram Micro   

“Cybersecurity services for Ingram are primarily structured into three buckets, which are smart assure, smart secure, and smart protect. The structure is very much from a point of view of preventive, detective and mitigation. The Managed Services part is taken care of by the protect initiative, the deployment parts are taken care of by the smart secure initiative and the assessment part is taken care of by the smart assure initiative.”

Cybersecurity is one of the top 10 risks reported post pandemic

Siddharth Aima  
Sr. Consultant, Cybersecurity Services, Ingram Micro 

“As the pandemic has led to the adoption of remote work working for many organizations, it has also increased the attack surface for hackers globally. This oversized shift adopted by organizations would have helped them with continued operations but security failures have been a continuous challenge for many. Cyber security lies in the top 10 risks that have been reported post pandemic.”

Fraudsters are sending scripts through phishing links or email bombing

Himanshu Rastogi 
Consultant - Cybersecurity Services, Ingram Micro  

 “Majority of organizations are already using custom made products but still, they are being affected by cyber fraud on a daily basis. It has been stated by the regulatory that more than 70% of the fraud is happening just because of the user awareness or fraud, which has been caused by the organization resources, which can be the current resources or the previous or the ex-employees of the organization.”

Detecting suspicious behaviors on endpoint

Suhas Kashyap 
Sr. Technical Architect, Cyber Security, Ingram Micro 

 “We must realize that securing ourselves against possible frauds is not a one-time activity, this needs to be done on a day-to-day basis. While the organizations exist to do business, security is also of paramount importance to them. Having less vulnerability in the system means there is less room for a cyber attacker to get through. Whenever someone compromises your system, one of the goals of an attacker is to be undetected for as long as possible.

There has been jump in cybercrimes especially adversely targeting enterprises

Prof. Triveni Singh   
S.P- Cyber Crime- U.P. Police  

“There has been an exponential rise in ransomware cases against enterprises or individuals. We have seen there has been a rise in ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure of the state and the nation. Definitely the adversaries are very much active in the corporate sector or settling their personal agenda but recently we have seen in Lucknow there has been an attack on high net worth individuals. Their entire network, their desktop, even their mobile phones were hacked. It was a kind of DDoS attack. They were not able to access their data, their client profile etc.”

Experts should prioritize cyber in cyber decisions 

Lt. Gen. Dr. S.P. Kochhar
D.G., COAI 

“Industries are in the process of digital transformation. New technologies like cloud, IoT, Artificial Intelligence and so on are spreading their wings very fast. On the flip side, this means that cybersecurity risks are rising and if we want to benefit from a positive economic impact of ICT, maintaining a secure ICT environment is a key imperative. As we have seen the COVID 19 pandemic has actually catalyzed the use of digital tools both at the work place and at home. At the same time it has often led to increase in frequent costly and damaging cyber incidentals. During the pandemic digitalization has increased, which has led to the growth of global use of services such as videoconferencing, which has grown tenfold at least.”

Massive adoption of electronic format has been seen due to COVID-19

Dr. Pavan Duggal   
Founder & Chairman of International Commission on Cyber Security Law, explained     

“Today we are living in transient times. The COVID-19 is substantially over, but this has had an immense impact on almost every activity that we do in our day-to-day lives. No wonder the coming of COVID-19 has had a real substantial impact upon cyberspace. In fact, the world is always going to be now seen as pre-covid and post-covid because this COVID has been the dividing line. In my recent book ‘New Cyber World Order Post Covid-19’, I have argued that by the time nations are victorious against the current and subsequent wave of COVID-19 infections, we will enter into a new cyber age where a new cyber world order will be awaiting us. And two essential elements of the new cyber world order will be a massive increase in cyber crimes, which will become our companion in life.”

As the human race has progressed, so has the risk

Dr. Praveen Kumar Khosla   
Executive Director, C DAC, said

 “The COVID 19 pandemic has led to loss of lives, as well as loss of livelihoods. We are facing a third wave in India of the pandemic. We are also experiencing cyber pandemic. In cyber pandemics there is no second or third wave. There will be the challenge of eternal waves. At the same time, achieving cyber superiority is not a utopian goal. Here in India, we have many challenges presently, the responsibilities of cybersecurity fall in the domain of many ministries, there is the Ministry of Home Affairs, Minister of electronics & IT and minister of defense and many other organizations within them, many verticals going on. Honorable Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a vision of making India the global hub of cybersecurity products and services.”

Cyber security has become critical of our existence

Sanjay Sahay Ex IPS 
Founder & Director- TechConPro, commented  

“The digital transformation which the companies tried to make for the last two decades was finally accentuated and achieved by COVID. It is a very different sort of a factor which brought us into a situation where the physical world finally got restricted to our particular rooms and houses given the pandemic situation. We stressed out into the online world, to fulfill all our requirements, may it be education, may it be your job, entertainment, interacting with your friends and family to the extent that even marriages, birthdays, everything started happening in the digital world.”

Only a logical systemic system can prevent fraud

Major General    
Dilawar Singh, Ex-Indian Army 

“Each one of us is affected by the new environment. Last couple of years, almost every citizen across the world is now connected to the digital world either through the mobile or through the laptop or credit card or through digital identity or synthetic identity, somewhere or the other, each one of us is affected and connected by it. In the last one year, the estimated number of frauds in the digital world has crossed 1 billion and the amount of money defrauded from the unsuspecting people has gone into many millions.”

Security is one of the most integral and intrinsic part of VMware’s products

Vinay Bhat   
Director - Networking and Security, VMware India

“Security is not something new to the session. VMware is largely known to be an infrastructure company, delivering solutions like private cloud virtualization, and stop virtualization utilization. All these infrastructure elements that we deliver, security is one of the most integral parts and security is intrinsic to whatever we deliver. That is why if you are using a VMware product today that will be security enabled, which means you are safe to use a VMware product very safe to use VMware either on cloud or on prem.”

A zero-trust approach can insulate businesses from impact of a data breach

Lata Singh
Director- Regional Technology Sales Leader- India & South Asia-IBM India 

Pointed out, “All of us know that businesses have moved towards digital transformation journeys and in the last two years during the pandemic, we had an accelerated transformation journey happening through multiple organizations. One of the byproducts of this journey is data. Data is a new era. We have heard about it often turning business models upside down, while guiding the world through its health and economic challenges. It is not enough; it is a source of risk unless you can trust it. In 2.5 billion gigabytes of data, both structured and unstructured I want to stress on the unstructured because a lot of the data now that we are getting is unstructured data and generated every single day.”

Attacks are becoming more and more sophisticated

Radhesh Walwadkar   
Manager – Systems Engineering (Enhanced Tech) for India & SAARC- Fortinet   

Cited the example of how during the first lockdown everybody was working from home, with companies giving remote access to their employees. "To run the day to day operations was the biggest champion that came into the picture. And you will be surprised that the authentication solution from FortiGate, which was the lowest revenue generator in the past but during the pandemic that particular solution created the highest revenue for us.

Remote working is now a reality, not a trend any more

Vikas Malhotra
Country Manager, LastPass

“Over the last two years organizations have grappled to find the right means to enable remote working, irrespective of the size of the organization made across culture, people, technologies and processes. Remote work isn't a trend anymore, but rather a new way for businesses to operate. IT teams today are coping with multiple devices, networks and ways to enable employees to access professional applications.”

One ransomware attack is taking place in every eleven seconds

Sudharsan Aravamuthan     
APAC Solution Lead – Data Intelligence & Content Solutions- Hitachi Vantara

“Cybersecurity is a very big topic. So we are going to focus on one thing today, and that's ransomware. Experts from cybersecurity ventures estimate that one attack will take place every 11 seconds the reason we can look into why there is this unprecedented rise of cyber attacks now and the reason for that I would say is threefold. One is access. Everything is connected, even small organizations have dozens of end-points. An attacker can be at the end of the network at a click of a button. Second reason is the attack surface is passive, right from the hardware and software in your environment, everything can be penetrated. That third reason is a huge amount of incentive. There are trillions of marketable data behind corporate firewalls.”

Businesses face a challenge of doubling of traffic within the data centers

Prakash Bell 
Head-Security Engineering (India & SAARC), Checkpoint Software Technologies

“Data centers are getting bigger and there is increased pressure to drive higher efficiency in smaller footprint and also power consumption to be reduced while operating these large facilities. Not only that, I think current technologies are not able to scale rapidly and provide that level of segmentation that is required in these data centers. One of the challenges businesses face is that the traffic within the data centers literally doubles every three years and to keep up with this, we need a solution that is scalable and high speed without impacting the latency of the business applications.”

Threats are ever evolving from traditional viruses to advanced targeted threats

Ravindra Baviskar
Director - Sales Engineering (India & SAARC) - Sophos Technologies

“We all know cybersecurity is designed to stop or mitigate these cyber attacks. If it sounds like a war that is because it is a war only thing is this one is 24/7 and enemies are faceless. You install a next generation firewall and next generation antivirus on your network and you are all set. These are useful security tools, but today's threats find their way through even the best defenses hence we need to look beyond the tools when it comes to ingredients of modern cyber security. One of the most significant aspects of cyber attack is that you are actually fighting the people who have their hands on the keyboard, sitting remotely and can do anything they want.”

Key trends driving the need for a better and an innovative approach to security

Manmohan Brahma
Solutions Architect Lead, Data Center Solution Sales- AMD India

“Today we will discuss AMD's process in building a highly resilient processor platform to take care of the modern day’s data center workload in a very secure way. There are several key market drivers and trends driving the needs for a better and an innovative approach to security.  The high cost of the data breaches will cost enterprises in downtime of the data center and that time you are not only losing money you are potentially risking the customer confidence on your company’s offerings. These are real costs enterprises face every day for not being prepared and not having proper security measures setup in the data center. Every day numerous threats are popping up, in fact according to a recent survey over 400 high-tech attacks and threats are being introduced every minute.”

S Mohini Ratna
Editor, VARINDIA  

“We come to the close of this year’s Cyber and Data Security event, on behalf of the entire team of VARINDIA, it gives me immense pleasure to present the vote of thanks to the august audience and acknowledge the contribution of those who worked really hard and make this event happen. I take immense pleasure in extending my sincere thanks and are indebted to the sponsors of today’s event, Ingram Micro, Lastpass, VMWare, Softcell, Fortinet, AMD, TechData IBM, Hitachi iValue, Sophos, Checkpoint and Instasafe who have supported us wholeheartedly and made this event a grand success.”

The first panel discussion saw panelists Dr. Harold Dcosta, CEO, Intelligent Quotient; Anuj Aggarwal, Chairman, Centre for Research on Cyber Crime & Cyber Law; Sandeep Sengupta, Founder, ISOAH Data Securities; Dr. Karnika Seth, Cyberlaw Expert & Founder, Seth Associates Law Firm; and Harnath Babu, Partner & CIO- KPMG India.

Dr. Karnika Seth
 

In the first panel discussion session, Dr. Karnika Seth, Cyberlaw Expert & Founder, Seth Associates Law Firm, said, “In today's time we see the pandemic, especially the 500% rise in the crime rate. The kind of cyber crimes which are provided in cyberspace, right from ransomware attacks to social engineering attacks and QR code scams. And not only that, the stalking activity, cyber stalking, corporate fraud, data thefts, have increased multiple polls in this time frame.”

Sandeep Sengupta

Sandeep Sengupta, Founder, ISOAH Data Securities, commented, “We are moving towards digital India, but very few people in India have learnt digital hygiene. More than that, as we are fast adopting technology, the IT Act and the different laws that we have in our country that have to be upgraded and updated as per the technology advancements.”

Anuj Aggarwal

Anuj Aggarwal, Chairman- Centre for Research on Cyber crime & cyber law, said, “It is important to understand digital transactions, the usage has really gone up which is good. The use of the internet is like a highway, as we are building very fast highways in this country. The accidents are increasing because people are not following the basic etiquettes or the discipline of the past. Similarly the internet you said any speed would have gone multiple times.”

Dr. Harold D’costa

Dr. Harold D’costa, CEO, Intelligent Quotient, pointed out, “As what has been said cybercrimes are all time high, there is no doubt about it. We are one of the largest growing economies in the world now, almost eight to 9% of the GDP. But those projections only can take place once we have basic cybersecurity practices in place in all of the verticals like banking, telecom, manufacturing, education. All the verticals would require better cybersecurity practices to be going on. The digital economy is revolving around and most of the people now work around digital assets.”

Harnath Babu

Harnath Babu, Partner & CIO, KPMG India, said, “The adversary activity has really gone up and the primary reason obviously we have seen as digital transformation and technology adoption in the last couple of years actually gone up. And most of the organizations are really focusing on catching up on the technology. They are not really giving it space. They are not really giving any space for various other requirements that are supposed to be dealt with from a primary cybersecurity perspective.”

While moderating the panel Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Editor-in-Chief-VARINDIA, said, “With the growing use of Internet and developing advanced technology systems globally, there has been an apparent increase in the uses of online banking system across the world, accompanied by widespread incidents of fraud and attack. Cybercrime can impact businesses in more than just financial ways. Companies have to rethink how they collect and store information to ensure that sensitive information is not vulnerable. Secondly, the attackers behind the campaign exploited the current prevalence of bring your own device policies by using the stolen credentials to register their own device on the target network, which they can use to expand their presence on the network and propagate the attack further. It is important for business to have a company wide security plan in place to ensure employees help protect sensitive company data.” 

The second panel discussion:  How to mitigate fraud in the digital world'

Pankaj Mittal of Digizen Consulting commented that the whole digital acceleration has affected fundamental physical boundaries, with people seen working from home from any applications or accomplishing their work from any device. "So cyber attacks are likely to happen either on an individual level, machines or your data center. But what is important is that there has to be a company's process for cybersecurity awareness, to get a basic understanding about things like email."

Venkata Satish Guttula of Rediff.com India said thatdot com customers are already on. "Since we are already into providing security, we have taken all kinds of security necessary to keep our lines secured. Having said that, we have found out that not only our customers but many people in industry have fallen victim to the fraudsters."

Radhesh Walwadkar, Manager – Systems Engineering (Enhanced Tech) for India & SAARC- Fortinet cited the example of how during the first lockdown everybody was working from home, with companies giving remote access to their employees. "To run the day to day operations was the biggest champion that came into the picture. And you will be surprised that the authentication solution from FortiGate, which was the lowest revenue generator in the past but during the pandemic that particular solution created the highest revenue for us.

Harish Jain, CISO- CNH Industrial & Capital Financial Services said, "We generally talk about COVID-19 or pandemic. But in my view, digital acceleration is bound to happen to support the business growth journey that every organization is looking for. Yes, of course the pandemic has helped to expedite the journey. Those organizations who were not getting into a digital mode in the period of five years, they are probably completing in two years now. So that expedition is of course there."

Archie Jackson from Incedo said, "The pandemic truly has been a catalyst to the growth of the cybersecurity space as well as becoming more mobile. The current pandemic has made it very crucial for organizations to make sure that their offices, their infrastructure, data, and their endpoints are all fully secured. The pandemic has also facilitated a great migration towards cloud because, again, as businesses organizations started operating remotely the agility, the productivity, the performance of the business has become a very key fundamental aspect."

Ratnesh Chandra, CTO- Punjab & Sind Bank said, "Since the past two years, digitalization activity has been increasing rapidly and because of this progress employees have been able to remotely work, getting access to the office environment all remotely. But are organizations able to maintain that level of security while giving access to hundreds of employees in terms of the right malware and right kind of anti-virus? That's where the question lies."

The second panel discussion  - 'How to mitigate fraud in the digital world' saw panelists Pankaj Mittal, CEO- Digizen Consulting, Venkata Satish Guttula, Director-Security- Rediff.com India Ltd.; Radhesh Walwadkar, Manager – Systems Engineering (Enhanced Tech) for India & SAARC- Fortinet; Harish Jain, CISO- CNH Industrial & Capital Financial Services; Archie Jackson, Sr. Director (IT & Security)- Incedo; and Ratnesh Chandra, CTO- Punjab & Sind Bank participating. It was moderated by Dr Deepak Kumar Sahu, Editor-in-Chief , VARINDIA. He opened the discussion by saying how network barriers are fast diminishing and systems are getting integrated more than ever before. This has however also increased the attack surface of organizations. Ransomware is a rapidly advancing online criminal activity that affects businesses, financial institutions, government agencies and so on. 

For the third panel discussion, panellists encompassing different industries joined the session, which includes names - Upkar Singh, VP-IT- RMSI; Kapil Mehrotra, CTO- National Commodities Management Services Limited; Jagannath Sahoo, Head Service Delivery Cyber Security, Managed Security services -Airtel Business; Satish Kumar Dwibhashi, SVP & CISO- InMobi Group and Shrinivas Patankar, Chief Security Consultant- Softcell Technologies

 

Upkar Singh of RMSI said, "As businesses begin offering more remote work options, their attack surfaces grew concurrently with their disparaged workforce. We are witnessing an increased reliance on public cloud services and vulnerable enterprise VPN. But many of these large organizations are not using zero trust security or having an efficient security posture are becoming more vulnerable to network intrusion attacks. And the most common attack surface is trending by geography and company size with industries most vulnerable to public cloud exposure, malware, ransomware and data breaches."

Kapil Mehrotra of National Commodities Management Services Limited also found the topic quite relevant."Security breach incidents nowadays have increased. Still, email spamming and phishing attacks are still number one. But whenever we talk about the attack surface, we have to understand the digital ecosystem of an organization. The reason being is only computers are not targeted but your network is equally targeted, your operation, the people – everything is targeted because hackers nowadays are doing a lot of research before they are attacking an organization."

Jagannath Sahoo, Head Service Delivery Cyber Security, Managed Security services -Airtel Business commented, "The question is whether surface attack is increasing; yes it is increasing and it is increasing heavily every day. Since I am handling so many customers, I should be able to understand what will be happening to every customer. That is where security comes into play. So if I summarize the top four threats today – the first is ransomware, second is phishing, the third is data leakage and the fourth is hacking. With remote working becoming the order of the day, these top threats are becoming even more critical. I would also like to add the Insider threat as one more threat to the entire list since it is also becoming very critical nowadays."

Satish Kumar of InMobi Group said, "A traditional organization had the perimeter drawn, very confined to the organization but today with cloud adoption, emerging technologies and remote working, the risk landscape has expanded a lot. The COVID has added a new challenge where employees work from home. Most of the IT companies have replaced normal office working with hybrid workforce, thus expanding the cyber risk landscape to homes. Cyber security in my view besides being technological is also a business enabler – it is all about ensuring how to keep businesses secured and productive."

Shrinivas Patankar of Softcell Technologies said, "Because of this pandemic, our perimeter basically no longer exists. Our perimeter is extended to the cloud. Now, many organizations have begun to transition to the cloud. It could be applications or websites or whatever it is, but what is missing is the visibility. Today we buy a lot of tools, create a lot of processes but who is there to monitor it. You can only protect what you see. If things are going wrong and you don’t have the visibility that will be a big challenge. Today hackers are not targeting individuals, systems and networks, but they are targeting back-end systems." 

For the third panel discussion, panellists encompassing different industries joined the session, which includes names  - Upkar Singh, VP-IT- RMSI;  Kapil Mehrotra, CTO- National Commodities Management Services Limited; Jagannath Sahoo, Head Service Delivery Cyber Security, Managed Security services -Airtel Business; Satish Kumar Dwibhashi, SVP & CISO- InMobi Group and Shrinivas Patankar, Chief Security Consultant- Softcell Technologies. The discussion was moderated by Dr Deepak Kumar Sahu, Editor-in-Chief, VARINDIA. He opened the discussion for the panellists by mentioning that cybercrimes become more sophisticated owing to which businesses need to stay one step ahead. Protecting a business against cyber-attacks can become costly but it can also safeguard the relationship between the organization and the customer.

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu
Editor-in-Chief-VARINDIA 

 “I like to introduce the two panelists who are joining the Fire Side Chat Session. We have Jayant Gundewar, Executive Director- Value Solution Business, Ingram Micro. Jayant joined Ingram Micro in April 2021 and has experience in sales marketing and business development of IT production and service across the India geography. Prior to Ingram micro he served as Senior Director Transformation and platform services at NTT. He has served several strategic roles and has immense experience in managing channel partners, customers and delivering technology products. We also have Vikas Malhotra, Country Manager, LastPass. Vikas is credited with the success at Wipro, Dell, Symantec, Oracle, LogMeIn and now with LastPass in India. In his current role, he is responsible for building & leading the LastPass business in India & SAARC. Vikas has driven strategic business growth in the marketplace for the organizations and has successfully developed & leveraged relationships towards achievement of targets and high levels of customer satisfaction.”
 

The strength of a chain is in its weakest link
 

“If I go by my experience, I see that in large companies, even mature enterprises, it is very difficult to prevent a hacker from compromising an employee or vendor credential. In fact, employees, vendors get targeted by phishing attacks, either by clicking on malicious attachments, or infected websites. Now this may not be intentional on their part, but this is what is happening while the user accounts are getting compromised. Now we all know that the strength of a chain is in its weakest link. And it may be people in this case, but the only way to go forward as I see is to really have a zero trust framework addressing this environment and have a very tight compliance on the data classification. This is in correlation with the GRC should have much better predictability on the risk picture and also a complete view of the entire security posture.”

Jayant Gundewar
Executive Director-Value Solution Business, Ingram Micro
 

Employees’ unintentional ignorance towards their password is increasing
 

“Published in June last year a study analyzed some 80,000 security incidents across the world, out of which there were 5000 Plus confirmed breaches. So there is a difference between that incident and a declared data breach. Out of those data breaches, those 5000 plus data breaches which spanned from all the way from US to Australia. What came out was a startling fact that 80% breaches were because of human errors. And 60 plus percent from that data was because of compromised credentials. The fundamental problem somewhere is that employees’ unintentional ignorance towards their password or credential hygiene and our digital footprint is increasing. We have multiple apps, more and more businesses are offering their services through digital channels and to sign up we need an account everywhere. We end up having the same user ID, same password across all these channels and bring the same thing to our corporate world also.”

Vikas Malhotra
Country Manager, LastPass