Dizengoff cautions against reactive measures in fight against cyber attacks
AGAINST the backdrop of increasing high profile data breaches with increasing sophistication, businesses and organisations in the country have been cautioned against implementing reactive protective measures.
The Sales & Channel Manager, Networks and Cybersecurity, Dizengoff Nigeria, Akanna Iweka, who gave this warning, said the sheer viciousness of growing cyber-attacks and threats globally makes it imperative for security efforts to focus on preventive, rather than reactive protection measures.
Iweka, in a chat, while reviewing Nigeria’s cyber security outlook for 2018, cautioned that organisations should select security products that provide superior security value.
“They should go for products that deliver value not just in terms of monetary cost but more for their security effectiveness. Reactive security strategies can no longer protect businesses against the sheer viciousness of highly sophisticated cyber security-attacks and threats that have evolved.”
He canvassed the adoption of more secure preventive security platforms like the “Palo Alto”, which natively brings together all key network security functions, including advanced threat protection firewalls, IDP/IPS and URL filtering. “Organisations are struggling to protect themselves from security breaches. They implement various security tools and networks, applications, cloud, and endpoints, among others, they make conscious efforts to meet regulatory compliance; their security teams work to comb through endless security alerts; and yet, there has been an increase in successful cyber breaches and data loss.” Iweka said responses that have been implemented have failed in part because “threats and threat actors have evolved, while many security solutions have not. Threats have become more sophisticated, automated and low-cost to execute, and occur in various forms, in quantities and at paces faster than organisations are prepared to handle.
“All of these have happened while many security tools, solutions and platforms have maintained the same practices proving inadequate for protecting systems against breaches.”