From last year’s attack on Equifax, which exposed the personal data of some 145 million customers, to the more recent hack of British Airways which could cost the airline up to $660 million, ever more sophisticated cybercriminals seem able to inflict permanent damage on a company’s reputation and finances almost at will.
For their part, as cities become smarter they too are increasingly exposed to malicious outsiders: in April 2017, hackers caused more than 150 emergency sirens in Dallas to blare for hours in the middle of the night, undermining trust in a critical public service.
“The adversaries just keep on coming and they are better equipped than ever before,” says Stan Black, the chief security and information officer at workspace technology company Citrix, named Cybersecurity Professional of the Year at this year’s Cybersecurity Excellence Awards.
“The main problem for businesses is that with the growth of the Internet and the rise of Cloud services, there are more pieces and more links and it takes only one weak link to expose you to attack.”
Cybersecurity is no longer just an issue for the IT department. According to the 2018 CEO Survey from consultancy Pwc, 40% of CEOs are now anxious about cyber threats, up from 24% last year. It is fast becoming a critical priority for business leaders to secure their organizations’ devices, networks and cloud services, while at the same time preserving all the benefits of digital transformation.
“People want an experience that is simple to use as well as inherently secure, on any device and any network,” Black says. “That is the main challenge today”
As published in TIME magazine
