EDITOR’S QUESTION
WHAT ARE THE MAJOR
CYBERTHREATS TO THE
NORTH AMERICA REGION?
Most enterprises are 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, security budgets, with cloudbased
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.
In our inaugural Editor’s Question feature,
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
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 (network-attached
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.
If you’d like to contribute to future Editor’s
Questions, please email:
[email protected]
“
MOST
ENTERPRISES
ARE FACING THE
CHILLING REALITY
THAT, AT SOME
POINT, THEY
WILL BECOME
THE TARGET OF A
CYBERATTACK.
32 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com