Netskope India Safeguarding Businesses' Digital Assets with Emerging Cybersecurity Trends

The cloud security provider Netskope India is at the forefront of protecting businesses' digital assets in the nation. With a focus on threat intelligence, cloud security, and data protection, it offers creative solutions to reduce the dangers associated with the growing use of cloud computing. In a chat with VARINDIA, Alok Kothari, Managing Director, Netskope India shares insights on the current security trends, how to effectively ensure cyber safety and safeguard data, importance of AI and ML, Risk Mitigation Strategies etc. 

Emerging cyber security trends  
Cloud-based malware delivery has surged in the country. On the need for robust security measures, Alok comments, “India is at a pivotal time in terms of cybersecurity. Connectivity upgrades achieved in India in recent years have unlocked a wealth of opportunities for the country to digitise and create efficiencies in many sectors. But with technological progress usually comes higher cyber risk. Using and plugging more connected solutions to their tech stacks, most organisations are expanding their attack surface, and cybersecurity awareness and capabilities have to evolve. Cloud apps are now the preferred delivery mechanism for malware in India.”

Effectively ensuring cyber safety 
As per Alok, “There’s a trifecta to efficient data protection: visibility, protection, and user experience. Visibility means organisations need to have full and real-time visibility of all static and dynamic data hosted and transiting through their network and to third-party stakeholders. Protection means that if data is going to unauthorised places or being accessed by unauthorised people or devices, there should be guardrails to block those actions and prevent data leaks from happening. And user experience means applying data protection in a way that won’t affect employees’ experience, and will enable them to do their best work.”

Measures to safeguard data  
Talking about safeguarding data, Alok points out, “Threat actors are incredibly creative when it comes to developing new techniques and strategies to access other peoples’ data. The latest example of this is generative AI and we are already seeing cyber criminals leverage tools such as ChatGPT to develop more convincing social engineering content, or more technical tactics designed to compromise machine-learning systems such as prompt engineering, adversarial attacks, data poisoning or model inversion - just to give a few examples.

Ultimately, the best way to continue to safeguard data in the future will be to put data at the heart of a security strategy. This ensures that trends such as cloud adoption, digital transformation and hybrid work can all move forward, with their manifold growth opportunities, without leaving an organisation’s most valuable assets exposed.”
 
Importance of AI and ML in detecting and preventing cyber threats   
Delving deep into AI & ML, Alok says, “AI and ML are both being used by threat actors, but they have also allowed the cybersecurity industry to achieve significant progress as well. For example, Netskope AI Labs have been granted more than a hundred AI and ML patents in the past few years. These are innovations that - for example - underpin our hyper sophisticated data loss protection (DLP) engines that secure data.

These engines now have the ability to identify if sensitive data is being extracted within an image or a screenshot taken by someone who could be trying to bypass an organisation’s policies, and block the action. They can also identify and prevent specific types of data from being inputted into generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.”

Effective Risk Mitigation Strategies for Organizations 

While suggesting strategies for Reducing Risk, Alok comments, “The Internet of Things is the sum of all connected devices around the world. One of the challenges IoT raises is the lack of global standards for embedded cybersecurity, at the moment organisations need to do a lot to add appropriate security functions to their IoT infrastructure - and to integrate that security into their wider management tools for consistency and ease of management.”

“Strong IoT DLP capabilities should be able to identify and take action if there are suspicious behaviours or activities around connected devices within a company’s network. But before it comes to this, organisations should ask for information and guarantees from manufacturers and hardware vendors about the level of security embedded in their devices, and stay away if they are not able to provide satisfactory answers”, he points out.  

To Conclude 

In his concluding words Alok says, “New technologies extend an organisations’ attack surface, and the cloud is a perfect illustration of this. Netskope Threat Labs data shows that cloud apps are now the preferred delivery mechanism for malware in India. Based on anonymised usage of hundreds of thousands of Indian workers, we saw that cloud malware delivery in India almost doubled from 33% of all malware deliveries in May 2022, to 63% in April 2023, a significantly greater growth than global figures. This is why cloud security is quickly becoming a critical component of a solid cybersecurity strategy. Organisations should ensure that their security architecture is designed to monitor and inspect cloud ecosystems and the huge amounts of traffic and data travelling between their network and the myriad of cloud apps used by their employees.”