Our President Spoke At the United Nation’s Global Entrepreneurship Initiative Cybersecurity Forum

Ilan Sredni represented Palindrome Consulting at the recent Cybersecurity Forum held by the Global Entrepreneurship Initiative.

The Palindrome Consulting team is proud to have had our president, Ilan Sredni speak at The Global Entrepreneurship Initiative’s Cybersecurity Forum. Held at the United Nations Headquarters, this event offered business leaders the opportunity to discuss and learn about the latest developments in the global cybercrime landscape.

At this year’s Forum Ilan’s talk focused on 3 T’s of Cybercrime Prevention.

Training: Companies are at risk based on their easiest targets, the least trained employees. Playing Russian roulette with the company data in one simple mouse click away. Continuous training with a variety of different methodologies in order to have employees be knowledgeable and aware.

Tools: Without going into the specific toolset that can be deployed at any given time, they change very quickly due to the threats that are changing almost in real time. As the threats become more sophisticated and advanced, our tools need to evolve as well. A variety of different proactive and reactive tools help identify the threat, resolve the impact and restore the network back to full functionality. The key in the process is to be ready to Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond & Recover from any result one finds.

There are cases when the tools and training are not sufficient due to the nature of how advanced some of these attacks are. In those cases, one must have an as well as state of the art business continuity and disaster recovery solution in place in order to recover.

Testing: No matter how much training you have done for your staff or how advanced the tools might be, we must be realistic that the Cyber-criminals trying to hack your data are better funded and much more aggressive. We recommend that there be continuous testing of the tools and the training on them.

Why Is Cybersecurity Important?

We take cybersecurity seriously because cybercrime continues to be a major concern for businesses around the world. The fact is that the cybercrime business has never been bigger – it’s estimated that the global cybercrime industry will cause up to $6 trillion in damages in just a few years.

You don’t need to be told how important something like cybersecurity is – it’s obvious after all. Everyone knows the consequences of unsecured business technology. The bad news is that there is a major lack of skilled cybersecurity and general IT professionals in the IT field.

According to Gartner:

“The shortage of skilled security professionals has been a perennial problem that consistently results in failed security technology deployments. The number of unfilled cybersecurity roles is expected to grow from 1 million in 2018 to 1.5 million by the end of 2020.”

Furthermore, recent polling performed on behalf of Tripwire found even more troubling evidence:

• 93% of polled IT security professionals say the skills required to be a great security professional have changed over the past few years, which is making it harder to find properly skilled cybersecurity professionals.
• 85% report their security teams are already understaffed, and only 1% believe they can manage all of their organization’s cybersecurity needs when facing a shortage of skilled workers.
• 96% say they are either currently facing difficulty in staffing security teams due to the skills gap or can see it coming.

“The skills gap issue continues to worsen, which is troubling, since cybersecurity threats only continue to grow,” said David Meltzer, chief technology officer at Tripwire. “Additionally, security teams are in search of new skillsets to deal with evolving attacks and more complex attack surfaces as they include a mix of physical, virtual, cloud, DevOps and operational technology environments. It’s becoming more difficult to maintain critical security controls, and there are fewer people available to do it.”

It’s for all these reasons that Palindrome Consulting is committed to promoting cybersecurity awareness, both through events like the Cybersecurity Forum and in the services we provide. We look forward to the next opportunity for Ilan and other members of the Palindrome Consulting team to take part in the worldwide effort to enhance cybersecurity.