Resilience key to cyber security
Whenever you have exciting things happening in the digital world, you will always have malicious people who will try to abuse the system, says du CEO, Osman Sultan.
Speaking at a roundtable session at Gitex Technology Week 2017, Sultan noted that technology offers the antidote to stopping these malicious players. “However, that being said, we need to have the right experts, the right platform, and the right processes for us to be able to administer this antidote,” he said.
Sultan also took the opportunity to elaborate on its recent commercial partnership with international cyber security firm, darkMatter, that will see them offer enhanced cyber security products and services to enterprises across the country.
“We don’t just offer connectivity solutions anymore,” said Sultan.
“Today, du offers complete endto-end solutions to businesses, and our focus has always been on providing the very best in terms of security to our clients.”
The commercial partnership between the two companies complements du’s current suite of managed service products and services for its enterprise customers that are demanding higher levels of security. Through the partnership, darkMatter will provide its expertise to du’s extensive business customer base. The companies will work together to provide a range of service offerings, which include compliance and compromise assessments, mobile and web application assessments, and penetration assessments. Faisal Al Bannai, CEO of darkMatter, added that to protect society, collaboration is needed between different entities in the commercial and government sectors. “You need the proper technology, and you need a greater collaboration between the different entities that use this technology, and lastly, you need proper regulation that is passed by the government to properly work towards security in this day and age.”
He also noted that companies spend billions of dollars annually on security. Yet, despite the increasing amount of money being put into security, the amount of cyberattacks are also increasing.
“Ransomware attacks are increasing exponentially; and these are large-scale attacks,” Al Bannai said. “The size of the breaches are also increasing. The issue is not with digital devices, because those have existed for a while now; the issue is with connected digital devices. These connected digital devices offer a new opportunity for hackers.”
He explained that the security across different connected devices such as smartwatches and other wearables was very different. The lax security on certain devices was what hackers were using as a loophole to target systems today.
“There are fantastic benefits that you get with the smart city vision, however there is a serious hazard that needs to be addressed,” he noted. “There are a million items that can be hacked today because they are not mature from a security point of view. What we need is a constant evolution when it comes to awareness about such hazards. The focus has to be on cyber education from an early stage.”