FIGHTING FRAUD

CXO INSIGHT ME IN ASSOCIATION WITH SHAPE SECURITY A PART OF F5, ORGANISED AN EXCLUSIVE ROUNDTABLE EVENT FOR ORGANISATIONS IN THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA TO DISCUSS HOW THE TRADITIONAL APPLICATION SECURITY PARADIGM HAS SHIFTED AND WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE FUTURE PREVENTION TOOLS, PROCESSES, AND RHETORIC OF APPLICATION FRAUD AND ABUSE.

The stage for discussion was set by Larry Venter, VP of customer success and solutions engineering at Shape Security, with a short presentation on application security beyond effective bot mitigation. “One of the things we have to concentrate on is not just fighting fraud but getting an understanding of how we can effect best business outcomes in our struggle against fraud. When you think about how we have tackled fraud in the past and how we’d need to tackle it in the future, we are starting to tease out a few ways of looking at things differently. When you talk of application security beyond bot mitigation, two notions have come out – exponential outcomes and playful platforms.”

He added: “If you think about exponential outcomes, this is really where you can take a single outcome, study it, and then use it to influence second and third outcomes, etc. Though point solutions are effective, none correlate or persist that learning through the fight against fraudulent activity. This has led to the idea of using platforms to fight fraud. We all grew up with the notion of platform as a base configuration to plug additional capabilities into. While that is still true, the idea of modern platforms is a single, collective way of tying exponential outcomes together to create the best business benefits that you need at run time.”

Demystifying playful platforms, Venter said the idea behind it is to figure out how you play with the various outcomes produced at run time in the platform to achieve the best business outcomes.

Larry Venter

Describing what tomorrow will feel like, he said most customers tackle fraud in three definitive ways: they build things in house to defend against security breaches, invest massively in creating fraud teams and identity, which is starting to emerge as a cornerstone to everything.

“But, the problem is none of them produce a correlation and is very siloed today. We are now starting to see the emergence of this idea of how we pass data and persist learnings from security teams to fraud and identity teams. We started noticing this trend 18 months ago when some of our customers would bring into conversations with us not just security professionals but their fraud and identity professionals as well,” he said.

He pointed out another trend in fraud detection is humans acting like machines. “It is no longer about detecting and mitigating synthetic or bot traffic but about the journey towards legitimizing users. First, you have to determine whether they are human or not, and secondly, figure out if they are good or bad human. Then you need to legitimize that user and bring them back to the system without any friction.”

Participating in the discussion, Majed Alshodari, CISO of Allied Cooperative Insurance Group, observed that cybersecurity teams need to work closely with business teams to build reliable and secure platforms that will help to expand business operations. “You have to think of governance, proper configuration, or solutions and then create awareness to create human firewalls within your organization.”

Mir Dawar Ali, CIO of ACWA Power, said remote work trend following Covid-19 crisis has multiplied risks and endpoint protection has become more important. “We have isolated our critical infrastructure and implemented multiple layers of endpoint and network security with 24/7 monitoring to prevent fraud and other breaches.”

Hazem Awni Jarrar, CTO of King Faisal Foundation, agreed that endpoint protection is critical, especially in a heterogeneous environment where users log in from any location and any device. “We are enabling this with multi-factor authentication, central traffic monitoring, and IAM technologies.”

Other participants in the roundtable included: Abdullah AlAttas, CIO of SAMACO Automotive; Dr. Mustafa Qurban, IT director of King Fahad Military Medical Complex Hospital; Nouf Aljalaud, IT director of Saudi Ground Services; Sunil MS, IT head of Supreme Foods; and Neil Menezes, IT head of AMAALA Company.

RISE OF THE MACHINES

ANAS ABDUL-HAIY, DIRECTOR AND DEPUTY CEO AT PROVEN, EXPLAINS WHY ROBOTICS IS A HISTORIC LEAP AND EVERY-DAY SOLUTION

In a train of thoughts trailing back to 2002, one cannot help but come across iRobot’s Roomba, a vacuum cleaning robot and one of our first encounters with machines performing human tasks. Since then, robotics has come a long way, with its growth trajectory moving at speeds we never imagined possible. Looking back, we have visited the idea of a robot takeover in science fiction myth, with films and novels envisioning a future where robots could speak, walk, react and even feel. Interestingly, this is a description of the world we live in today; we have arrived at the future poets and writers once equated with fiction. How real is this ‘futuristic now’ in reality? Does the word ‘future’ describe progress or growth, with timelines and deadlines predicting smart cities due within time periods that are not long enough to even be fragments of history?

The future is now; it happens every day. For humanity, technology catapulted the human lifestyle and changed it drastically. For robotics, Artificial

Intelligence reduced myths and legends into real physical experiences. Robots have emerged from tech labs onto the forefront of business. We no longer have to wait for the general masses to interact with robots; they do it every day when they perform simple tasks such as calling their bank. In the UAE, popular banks like

Emirates NBD have adopted a Chatbot named Eva, automated to respond to repetitive client inquiries, and reducing human workload. This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what robotics is doing for the world.

Robotics falls perfectly into a puzzle of technological leaps we have made in the past twenty years, all leading to new heights for humanity; discovering new depths in the oceans and never-beforeseen territories in space to developing smart cities like NEOM, a planned area in Saudi Arabia set to feature the latest, most jaw-dropping technologies. The city derives its name from a bilingual play meaning “new future.” Its vision and early plans seem to echo the fictional depiction of utopia, further emphasizing the type of change robotics is creating on our lives.

Today, Proven Arabia is in the process of marketing humanoid robots that might be filling in typically human spots. Pepper is a semi-humanoid robot capable of reading human emotions and reacting accordingly. Pepper’s programmed social skills can place him as a host from spaces ranging from dinner parties to hospital reception areas. This checks the hospitality box, a field of work that requires years of experience and special skills from a human perspective. The business-minded would have been skeptical perhaps five years ago, but today an opportunity like Pepper can mean a great customer experience and a chance to cut long-term costs like monthly salary and social insurance.

Furthermore, robotics is entering the education field in two very different ways. As a teacher’s assistant, humanoid robots can co-host classes, engage students and share exciting inputs that might be repetitive from a human perspective. For example, NAO, a programmable humanoid robot can be incorporated in storytelling, history or geography classes. This adds excitement and engagement in the classroom. Another way robotics is being incorporated in education is by including it in the curriculum. Robotics is a practical science that students can learn about and apply , as well as grow with. As a school subject, robotics can help educate and inform about an array of fields, such as mechanics, physics, math and engineering; and this one class can develop into a university major given its rapid growth as an industry, providing jobs for millions.

Finance, a fast growing field fueled by the latest technology, is using robotics to provide a digital workforce to match and validate data and submit finalised reports into document management systems. Other applications are using RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to automatically settle trades and confirm allocation, a time-consuming process formerly performed manually. RPA bots are also found in finance transferring verified data into systems. Verification of licenses and identification has now become a much easier and much more productive process thanks to robotics. The process now digitises documents and uses native optical character recognition to save time and effort.

It is evident that robotics has become part of our everyday lives. From using a simple vacuum cleaner to building a smart city, there has been a massive shift in the way activities are performed, ranging from simple to complex world building.