WHAT ARE
THE MAJOR CYBERTHREATS TO THE NORTH
AMERICA REGION ?
ost enterprises are
M facing the chilling reality that , at some point , they will become the target of a cyberattack . It is no longer a case of ‘ if ’ but ‘ when ’. The attack surface has expanded with the proliferation of IoT and connected devices , blurring the lines between corporate and operational networks , while malicious actors find ever more sophisticated methods of deploying malware or phishing emails to cause disruption .
COVID-19 has clearly introduced new challenges to under-pressure security teams , who have scrambled over recent months to secure workforces which are now almost entirely remote .
Modern CISOs might not wear capes but they ’ re certainly fighting a battle every day . Microsoft recently surveyed close to 800 business leaders of companies of more than 500 employees in India , Germany , the United Kingdom and the United States to better understand their views of the pandemic threat landscape , as well as the implications for budgets and staffing and how they feel the pandemic could reshape cybersecurity long-term .
While the research demonstrated that the pandemic is accelerating the Digital Transformation of cybersecurity , it also highlighted that businesses are still impacted by the likes of phishing scams ,
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security budgets , with cloud-based technologies and architectures like Zero Trust set to be significant areas of investment moving forward .
North America is a vast territory , comprising several countries with different dynamics but , like much of the world , all are facing these sorts of threats .
We asked three industry experts what they consider to be the major cyberthreats to the North America region .
For Don Boxley , CEO and Co-Founder of DH2i , there are two threats of particular editor ’ s question
importance – Ripple20 and the work from home economy .
Meanwhile , Linus Chang , Founder and CEO of BackupAssist , highlights ‘ post compromise ransomware attack ’ as a potent threat and tells us how these risks demonstrate how important it is to keep good backups and protect them with the right tools and security .
For Michael Jack , VP Global Sales and Co-Founder , Datadobi , it appears that hackers now view NAS ( networkattached storage ) as the new ‘ honey pot ’. He says that , should the worst happen – a situation where your NAS or object storage has been locked by hackers – many IT professionals would find themselves wishing that they had spent more time thinking about what their most important and essential data was and managing it differently .
These three different insights demonstrate that there is not one specific major threat , but a number of different areas for CIOs and CISOs to be mindful of , prioritising security measures based on their own risk assessments . www . intelligentciso . com | Issue 31
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