Arabian Reseller - May 2021

MAY 2021

Volume 3 | Issue 3

www.arabianreseller.com

Securing Digital Economies Rohit Bhargava of Cloud Box Technologies speaks about the evolving security threat vectors in the region and how companies can mitigate those risks

GISEC 2021 SPECIAL EDITION

Industry experts weigh in on the security threat landscape in the region

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GISEC 2021 SPECIAL EDITION 20. Businesses Are Looking for Safer Strategies to be Online

22. Your Security Strategy Should Match the Current Operating Environment

CONTENTS

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24. Ransomware Groups Are Taking Advantage of Today's Remote Working Conditions 26. Companies Are Strengthening Cloud Tech to Accelerate Digital Transformation

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28. Human Mistakes Will Continue to Introduce Cybersecurity Threats 30. CIOs Have Accelerated Their Digital Transformation Efforts by One Year or More 32. AI Helps to Stress-Test Security Measures to Ensure Maximum Protection

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34. Bad Actors Are Increasingly Adopting Sophisticated Techniques

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36. Attacks Will Continue to Disrupt Remote Learning Activities Over the Coming Year 38. Attack Vectors Can Come From Virtually Any Angle 40. The Cyberattack Surface Continues to Expand

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News

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06. Kodak Alaris Announces EMEIA Partner of the Year Award Winners 07. Toshiba Gulf Dominates Storage Market in Saudi Arabia, UAE, and South Africa 08. Nozomi Networks Integrates with ServiceNow

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12. Mitsumi Wins ‘Distributor Of The Year’ Award From HP 14. ASUS Unveils Gaming Laptops with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 and 3050 Ti Laptop GPUs

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EDITORIAL MAY 2021 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Chris N. Fernando chris@ryshamedia.com SALES AND MARKETING

Ranbir Sen ranbir@ryshamedia.com ASSISTANT EDITOR

Edward Frank edward@ryshamedia.com

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Chris Fernando

Surviving a Cyber Pandemic According to a global study, cybersecurity threats are estimated to cost the world $6 trillion a year by 2021, and the number of attacks has increased fivefold after COVID-19.

Another study suggests that security incidents have exploded and cyberattacks increased across all industries, with the FBI Cyber Division reporting a 400% increase in daily cybercrime complaints during COVID-19 compared to the previous year – up to 4,000 a day.

The urgency to ‘be digital’ led to rapid adoption of cloud services and SaaS products to facilitate the growing remote workforce and to provide consumers with options to transact digitally from anywhere.

But securing these applications and transactions did not happen at the same pace. This led to breaches through compromised credentials, unsecure networks, and devices.

From ransomware to data breaches and from election security to unemployment fraud, COVID-19 has in many ways un-

leashed a new set of challenges and/or accelerated existing challenges within global enterprises.

It's a given that to succeed in the post-COVID-19 era, technology providers must rethink their strategies and offerings to accommodate a new security landscape. And they must continue to monitor customers’ needs and adjust sales, service, and training accordingly.

Although there is substantial literature on the threats technological vulnerabilities have on the industry, less research exists on how pandemics like COVID-19 are opportunistic for cybercriminals.

COPY EDITOR

Priyan Sampath priyan@ryshamedia.com SENIOR WRITER

Nisha Seth info@ryshamedia.com WRITER

Vishal Jagani info@ryshamedia.com GRAPHICS DESIGNER

John Christy info@ryshamedia.com

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Prarthana Mary prarthana@ryshamedia.com DIGITAL TEAM

Context Media LLP, Chennai, India. info@contextgroup.net www.arabianreseller.com

In this issue, industry experts throw some light on the security threat landscape in the region, the evolution of ransomware, the security threats to look out for, possible solutions to security issues and the way forward.

Do give this issue of Arabian Reseller a read and let us know how you are preparing to survive a cyber pandemic by emailing us at chris@ryshamedia.com.

C O N TA C T I N F O R M AT I O N Rysha Media LLC, Sharjah Media City (SHAMS), Al Messaned, Al Bataeh, Sharjah, UAE. sales@ryshamedia.com www.ryshamedia.com ALL RIGHT RESERVED While the publisher has made all efforts to ensure the accuracy of information in the magazine, they will not be held responsible for any errors whatsoever.

Cover Photo and Design by Ranbir Sen Copyright @2021

NEWS //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

quarters, excellence in terms of stock holding and product range, and initiatives such as work from home bundles and NHS pricing. Restore received the Top Performing Partner accolade. The company recorded strong overall performance and celebrated a number of key wins including an NHS hospital trust and large government agency.

Kodak Alaris Announces EMEIA Partner of the Year Award Winners Kodak Alaris hosted more than 200 partners from 43 countries at its 2021 virtual Partner Summit for the Europe, Africa, India and Middle East (EMEIA) region.

The overarching theme for the 2021 edition, which was opened by Kodak Alaris President & General Manager, Don Lofstrom, was ‘Growth Starts Here’.

During the 2021 event, Lofstrom provided a recap of the business’ strong performance in a year that presented unprecedented challenges, and reinforced the company’s commitment to continue to invest for growth. Plans to further expand the company’s market reach include bringing to market new versions of its award-winning production capture and distributed capture scanners and software solutions; continued innovation within the cloud-based connected solutions software and solutions space; forming and building new partnerships; and enhancing the company’s skills in software solutions and professional services to support these initiatives.

The event also shone a light on the excellence, growth and engagement of its top partners, with the company recognizing ten partners from the EMEIA region in its annual Partner of the Year awards. The winners were chosen based on their commitment to customers, investment in solutions from Kodak Alaris, year on year revenue and growth trajectory, as well as successful joint wins over the past year.

Two partners in the UK scooped awards this year. Midwich was named Top Value Added Distributor, in recognition of its strong performance across all four

In Germany, Datapool won the Top Solutions Partner Award, recognizing service excellence and outstanding performance in sales of Kodak Capture Pro Software.

The Top Strategic Partner honor went to ALOS, who successfully won a number of significant multi-site tenders within the financial services sector. e-das (now part of Ibykus) received the Service Partner Growth Award. e-das recorded significant year on year growth and continued to add value to Kodak Alaris’ software portfolio, providing customers with complex and challenging requirements with customized solutions. Vision Business Service GmbH earned a Special Award in recognition of a custom solution developed for a customer operating in a high-security arena.

High Performance for Information Technology (HP IT) was the winner of the Service Partner Loyalty Award. With travel restrictions in place limiting Kodak Alaris’ ability to support customers in Saudi Arabia onsite, HP IT stepped up, working collaboratively with the region’s service team to keep customers up and running. Also based in the UAE, Rookie Ninja scooped the award for Top Value Added Distributor Emerging Markets. In perhaps the toughest year of trading, the company achieved the highest revenue across the emerging market.

Other award winners included Viveris (France) who scooped the New Software Assurance Solutions Partner Award and Belgium-based Procedo who received the Top Performing System Integrator Award.

“These awards recognize the considerable contribution that our partners make to our business and applaud their success in helping our customers leverage Kodak Alaris technology solutions to solve the complex challenges they face,” said Gerry Kelliher, EMEIA Managing Director, Kodak Alaris. “The 2021 award winners have gone above and beyond, continuing to deliver outstanding levels of customer service and solve problems for their customers during these unprecedented times.”

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Citrix's Research Uncovers New Approach to Cyber Security Implementing security used to be simple: Build a perimeter and protect the resources inside. But as apps are increasingly moving to the cloud and work is happening anywhere, things have become more complicated, and the traditional architecture of castle and moat no longer works.

IT organizations around the world realize this, and according to the results of a Pulse survey conducted by Citrix Systems are abandoning traditional approaches to securing information and devices in favor of modern ones that enable them to overcome these challenges and deliver the future of work.

“In a world where resources can be accessed anywhere, anytime from any device, traditional security models focused on locking systems down won’t cut it,” said Fermin Serna, Chief Information Security Officer, Citrix. “What is needed is an intelligent, people-focused approach that allows organizations to secure all the tools, apps, content, and devices that employees need and prefer to use in a simple experience that can be customized to fit their personal preferences and evolving work styles.”

Of the IT executives and managers in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia Pacific region who responded to the measure, 64 percent indicated that they are aiming to shift from their current VPN strategy. Meanwhile, 71 percent said they are looking to a zero trust, cloud-based model as a replacement And employee experience will figure prominently in their plans. 97 percent of those surveyed cited employee experience as a key influence on their strategy going forward, and 75 percent said they are looking to improve the user experience through their design and execution.

“Employee experience is critical to delivering business innovation and growth, and security must support it,” Serna said.

“As the Citrix Pulse survey found, savvy organizations recognize this and are evolving their security postures to provide access to applications and information in a contextual and transparent way that empowers employees rather than frustrating them.”

OutSystems Launches Cloud Accelerators for AWS OutSystems has announced the launch of new components and resources called Cloud Accelerators for Amazon Web Services (AWS) aimed at accelerating innovation as fast as business imperatives change. OutSystems is initially delivering seven Accelerators that target crucial areas of digital transformation: customer experience transformation, workplace innovation, process optimization, and technology modernization.

The Accelerators combine components, samples, and training to help developers quickly and seamlessly build and evolve scalable applications that leverage key AWS services to support the following use cases: • Digital Identity Verification: Provide an onboarding experience with identity verification workflows, including face matching for opted-in users, which compares a photo or selfie with an identifying document such as a driver's license, built on Amazon Rekognition and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

• Video Call Validation: Deliver video engagement for a variety of use cases, including identity verification during customer onboarding, or field services support using Amazon Kinesis or Chime.

• Self-Service Chatbot: Reduce pressure on call centers by providing AI-powered chatbots and the ability to escalate to a human support agent as required, powered by Amazon Lex and Amazon Comprehend.

• Customer and Employee Engagement Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA): Offer new ways to engage with customers and employees using voice and VPAs such as Amazon Alexa.

• Multilingual Chatbot: Provide chatbots that are able to communicate in any language, using Amazon Translation Services, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Transcribe.

• Multilingual Video Interaction: Deliver real-time video interaction to support new customer engagement use cases, powered by Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Translation Services, and Amazon Transcribe.

• Personalized Streaming Experience: Provide superior workplace innovation experiences such as employee onboarding and training, built on Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon S3

Toshiba Gulf Dominates Storage Market in Saudi Arabia, UAE, and South Africa Toshiba Gulf FZE, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation, highlights the significant surge in its market share in key geographies of UAE, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa over the past year.

Having concluded its FY 2020 on high growth, the storage leader has also garnered a greater market share for its Surveillance HDD portfolio and has built on the positive reception of its recently launched cutting-edge products.

Santosh Varghese, Vice President – MEA, Toshiba Gulf FZE, commented, “At Toshiba Gulf, our focused priority continues to be to empower customers to navigate the increasingly digital landscape with world-class storage solutions. We have positively grown our market share over the past 12 months, and we attribute this success to unsurpassed quality and expansive product range, the relentless dedication of our valued employees and channel partners, and innovative go-tomarket strategies.”

The storage pioneer has invested substantially in strengthening its channel ecosystem. It has provided in-depth training workshops, resources and tools to manage challenging market dynamics and operate effectively in the new normal along with highly incentivized programs.

By continuing its ‘go wide, go deep’ channel policy and excellent product offering in 2020, Toshiba Gulf has seized a significant 45% market share in Saudi Arabia and a notable 30% in UAE and South Africa, cementing its leadership position in the storage sector across these territories.

The ongoing pandemic has accelerated the immediate need for organizations to digitalize their operations, which in turn has snowballed demands for data storage. According to World Economic Forum, by 2025, it is estimated that 463 exabytes of data will be created each day globally. This number will only get bigger as a result of the continuing impacts of COVID-19.

The pandemic has compelled organizations and educational institutions

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to adopt work-from-home and remote learning models, leading to a further explosion of data generation, and fueling the demand for personal storage.

Identifying the opportunities, Toshiba has doubled down on its HDD portfolio, with its Surveillance HDD line-up clocking a notable 17% climb in 2020 from 0.7% in 2018 in the Middle East and Africa region.

Toshiba’s recent launches in its Canvio Portable Storage lineup have been well-received by the regional market and will continue to see a strong demand during the course of this year.

The company expects to leverage the trends in the growing gaming market and position itself as a differentiator in the sector.

Canvio Flex is the new USB-C portable storage designed for PCs/Mac, computers/iPad Pro, and mobile digital devices/ Tablets for cross-platform compatibility.

Canvio Gaming is the new portable game storage designed for game consoles and gaming PCs. The Canvio Advance and Canvio Ready feature a new design that offers advanced and easily accessible portable storage. This next generation of Canvio designs delivers seamless portability, high storage capacity, and broad compatibility for various USB devices.

Varghese said, “The regional ICT industry will experience incremental growth as enterprises underpin their digital transformation strategies and modernize their operations.

Toshiba Gulf aims to continue enabling customers to achieve their digital ambitions with excellent and reliable product offerings. Over the last year, we have further differentiated our portfolio through innovation and strategic planning.

Toshiba’s brand equity has soared across all segments, thanks to our loyal channel partners. We have several exciting market plans and launches in the pipeline, and we look forward to collaborating even more closely with our channel partners this year.”

NEWS // ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

Nozomi Networks Integrates with ServiceNow

Vectra Cognito Now Available in the Microsoft Azure and AWS Marketplaces Vectra AI has announced the availability of its Cognito platform in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. The agreement with Microsoft will allow organizations interested in using the Vectra Cognito platform across cloud, data center, networks and IoT/OT to now test or purchase Cognito on Azure Marketplace using their pre-existing agreements with Microsoft.

The AWS partnership will allow AWS customers worldwide to deploy Vectra’s suite of solutions through their AWS Enterprise Discount Plan for seamless procurement at a reduced rate. The accelerated purchasing process ensures fast time-to-value for customers leveraging Vectra solutions to gain real-time security, operational and cost management insights across their hybrid AWS environment.

Account takeover in Office 365 has become the largest security threat vector in the cloud. The strategic approach allows the attacker to gain access to the data and privileges associated with the compromised account and then work their way laterally through the network. The Cognito platform accelerates threat detection, investigation, and response using AI to enrich cloud logs and network metadata.

Once enriched, the data is collected and stored with the right context to detect, hunt, and investigate known and unknown threats in real-time.

Azure users of Vectra’s Cognito platform can combine cloud and data center

detections with in-depth information from Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for greater context and stop attacks at the endpoint. Cognito is also seamlessly integrated with Azure Sentinel to create custom workbooks for enhanced investigation, correlation, and automation. For AWS users, Vectra’s Cognito platform integrates with AWS virtual private cloud (VPC) traffic mirroring to monitor all infrastructure-as-a-service traffic. Cognito also integrates with AWS Security Hub to publish Vectra detections as findings in Security Hub, enabling security teams to correlate Vectra attacker detections with other data sources for faster threat hunting and incident investigations.

“Vectra is focused on making things easier for its customers. Whether that requires helping security teams see and stop the most sophisticated cyberattacks at scale, or making it quick and easy to find, buy and deploy industry-leading threat detection and response technology,” said Randy Schirman, Vice President at Vectra AI. “For companies that rely on the global footprint, scalability, reliability and agility of Microsoft Azure and AWS, we now offer a one-stop shopping experience via a pre-approved and preferred purchasing channel.”

Vectra’s Cognito platform is now available worldwide on the Microsoft Azure and AWS Marketplaces. Purchases made through the two marketplaces also help streamline billing and procurement for joint customers.

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Nozomi Networks has announced a technology integration with ServiceNow that helps manufacturers deliver next-generation operational efficiencies and resilience. The certified integration makes it possible for manufacturing and other industrial processes to leverage the combined power of ServiceNow’s expertise in service and asset lifecycle management with Nozomi Networks’ industrial strength OT and IoT network visibility and security solutions. With this integrated solution, organizations can utilize real time OT and IoT asset information from Nozomi Networks with ServiceNow’s Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) and ServiceNow’s new Operational Technology Management products to quickly act on issues and immediately respond to operational threats.

With this new integration, customers can synchronize network assets details gathered from the Nozomi Networks’ solution into the ServiceNow platform. Assets are automatically mapped to the new ServiceNow OT data model, streamlining the onboarding of new and existing devices. This approach makes it possible for manufacturers to achieve a complete and contextual view of their operational technology environments and addresses the need to help ensure the availability of their critical technology.

“Smart manufacturing is a bottom-and-topline game changer, leveraging technology and data-driven workflows to boost efficiencies, gain greater resiliency and drive more value,” said Chet Namboodri, Nozomi Networks SVP, Business Development and Alliances. “At the same time, managing and securing these environments complicates manufacturing operations. Nozomi Networks is pleased to team with ServiceNow to simplify and support a new generation of process operations with the real time asset visibility that manufacturers need to speed response, reduce risk and increase compliance.”

“Digitalization is a top priority for manufacturers who want to build and protect resiliency and maintain a competitive edge in today’s global marketplace,” said Binoy Gosalia, Global Head of Industry Partnerships at ServiceNow. “Yet, too often information silos, manual processes, and a lack of visibility keep manufacturers from realizing the full benefits of their digital investments. Nozomi Networks integration with ServiceNow makes it possible to unlock all the benefits of digitization with a unified system of action that is informed by detailed, real time asset information.”

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NEWS //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

ServiceNow to Acquire Lightstep

Nexans Launches Digital Ceiling Solution LANactive XGigaSwitch DICE Nexans Advanced Networking Solutions has launched LANactive Digital Ceiling XGigaSwitch DICE. The key features are 2×10 Gbps SFP+ uplinks; 4x MultiGigabits access ports for connection of bandwidth-consuming applications; 4x Gigabit access ports for connecting further IP equipment and access ports are featured with PoE++ up to 90W. “With the increasing investment into intelligent buildings and sustainability, the digital ceiling is becoming an important part of modern networking architectures. The myriad of IoT devices that have productive and sustainable use cases built around it are continuously increasing. In today’s intelligent buildings it is not uncommon to find thermal cameras, air motion detectors, air quality sensors, temperature sensors, proximity sensors, surveillance cameras, wireless access points, all on the same network and often fitted in the same physical space. The digital ceiling is a solution for this device congestion. Nexans’ latest LANactive Digital Ceiling XGigaSwitch DICE, has innovative features including PoE and Gigabit access ports that enables the smooth roll out of the digital ceiling as an integral part of enterprise networking architectures,” explains Arafat Yousef, Managing Director – Middle East & Africa, Nexans Data Network Solutions.

“The internet of things (IoT) is continuing to grow at an astonishing rate. In fact, the IDC estimates that by 2025 over 150,000 new devices will join the IoT every minute.

Handling this level of growth demands ever more powerful IT networks. At the same time, bandwidth requirements are increas-

ing along with the need for power and data. This means that established network connections are reaching their limits and it is vital to think about new technologies that will be capable of meeting the demand for data traffic,” the company said.

The company further added, “A further challenge is that smart building systems are being increasingly integrated into IP networks.

In this case, it is not typically the bandwidth that is the main consideration. Instead, the main focus is on the provision of data and power to support applications like connected lighting, smart sensors and heating, air conditioning and security systems.”

“To handle these challenges in a cost and resource efficient way, while ensuring the overall flexibility of the IT network, Nexans has developed the fiber in the Digital Ceiling concept. To achieve this, a data/power/ control network is connected throughout the entire building via an overhead matrix installation. This offers a significant number of connection points, including Power-over-Ethernet (PoE), to link devices to building automation systems,” the company said.

“LANactive DICE meets the current and future network requirements of smart buildings. It is scalable and facilitates the upgrading of existing and new networking infrastructures. Fibre-based networks make the network future proof by meeting upcoming requirements of security, high bandwidth and energy savings. Fibre-based networks also allow sustainable and cost-effective maintenance of the network,” the company explained.

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ServiceNow has announced it has signed an agreement to acquire next-generation observability leader Lightstep. By acquiring Lightstep, ServiceNow will solidify and accelerate its position as the world’s leading enterprise platform for digital businesses. ServiceNow is already a recognized market leader in IT service management, IT operations management and digital workflows. With Lightstep, an emerging pioneer in next generation application monitoring and observability, ServiceNow will help DevOps engineers build, deploy, run and monitor state-of-the-art, cloud-native applications. Together, ServiceNow and Lightstep will extend the benefits of observability across the enterprise through digital workflows that convert real-time insights into action across all the technologies, people, and processes that enable digital business.

In a cloud and DevOps based world, the software that powers today’s enterprises is increasingly complex. Yet, companies are expected to increase innovation and velocity without sacrificing reliability and performance. The combination of ServiceNow and Lightstep will deliver deep operational insights so enterprises can more effectively use modern technology stacks.

Lightstep’s solution analyzes system-wide metrics and tracing data in real time to understand the cause and effects of changes to application performance, reliability, and development velocity. The Now Platform coordinates the technical and team response, connecting insights with actions needed to drive digital transformation. Customers will be able to more easily monitor and respond to critical signals and indicators of software health using Lightstep’s capabilities with ServiceNow’s IT workflow solutions’ ability to weave disparate elements into a seamless digital fabric. This gives business the confidence and clarity to drive faster innovation and better outcomes across the entire digital experience.

“Companies are betting on going digital in order to thrive in the 21st century, but the transition is often challenging to navigate," said Pablo Stern, SVP & GM, IT Workflow Products, ServiceNow. "With Lightstep, ServiceNow will transform how software solutions are delivered to customers. This will ultimately make it easier for customers to innovate quickly. Now they'll be able to build and operate their software faster than ever before and take the new era of work head on with confidence.”

NEWS //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

Mitsumi Wins ‘Distributor Of The Year’ Award From HP Mitsumi Distribution, a leading IT distributor today announced that it has been awarded the Hewlett Packard (HP) Global ‘Computing Distributor of the Year’ award for its extraordinary achievements in 2020 in the UAE and East Africa.

Acer Middle East Launches Rugged ENDURO Urban Notebook and Tablet Acer Middle East has unveiled a pair of new rugged devices, the Acer ENDURO Urban N3 notebook, and the Acer ENDURO Urban T1 tablet, designed to provide users with very best of durability and portability. Users who are always on the go will appreciate the ENDURO Urban N3’s compact profile, while families taking learning into their own hands will welcome the flexibility of the ENDURO Urban T1.

Acer ENDURO Urban N3 Notebook The Acer ENDURO Urban N3 (EUN31451W) is a 14-inch notebook that was designed for exploring new frontiers.

Weighing in at just 1.85 kg (4.08 lbs) light and being 21.95 mm (0.86 in) thin, it is portable enough to follow users while on the road but also sports a number of well-placed durability features that make it tough enough to venture off the road whenever adventure calls.

The laptop has been tested to meet MIL-STD 810H (military standard) and IP53 certifications, indicating that it can withstand harsher temperatures and drops in addition to being resistant to dust and water.

Notable features include shock-absorbent bumpers on each corner, water-proofed IO ports, speakers, and buttons on top of Acer’s unique Aquafan, a water-resistant fan that works in tandem with a cleverly designed drainage system to expel water that happens to enter the device.

The well-fortified laptop contains up to an 11th Gen Intel Core i7 processor, giving it plenty of power to get through whatever might come up in a day’s work, plus up to an NVIDIA GeForce MX330 GPU, up to a 1 TB SSD, and up to 32 GB of DDR4 memory. A full-function USB Type-C port,

Thunderbolt 4, an SD card slot and Intel Wi-Fi 6 (Gig+) offer everything users need to get connected, while 13 hours of battery life and a FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS display with 450 nits of brightness provide brighter, clearer visuals even when outside.

The Acer ENDURO Urban T1 (EUT110) is a 10-inch tablet designed for families in pursuit of adventure, whether in the urban wilderness or lands untamed. The device manages to be both slender and durable.

Weighing just 595 grams light and 9.8 mm (0.39 in) thin, it is also independently certified as being IP53 dust-and-water resistant and MIL-STD 810H compliant.

A chassis made from shock-absorbent materials, corners bolstered with reinforced bumpers, and a waterproof design to protect IO ports, speakers, and buttons make the device tough enough to withstand the rigors of daily life.

This tablet’s 1920 x 1200 resolution 10-point touch screen features 450 nits of brightness so users can enjoy content even in an outdoor environment. The Antimicrobial Corning Gorilla Glass, display features an ionic silver component that helps to protect the screen and keep it clean, while features like dual-band Wi-Fi, a 2MP front-facing camera, and a 5MP rear camera let the device double as a handy companion for outdoor learning experiences.

With up to 8 hours of battery life, Android 10 (Go edition) OS, and a quad-core processor, the Acer Enduro Urban T1 can follow users wherever they might go.

The Acer ENDURO Urban N3 Notebook and ENDURO Urban T1 Tablet will be available in the UAE from Q3 2021.

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The HP global channel partner award recognises top-performing partners across all of its geographical regions for 2020.

Mitsumi won two awards under the same category for UAE and East Africa markets – for its outstanding performance, commitment to customer excellence, and expanding HP’s reach in those markets.

Mitsumi’s management commented, “We are excited to win the 2020 ‘Computing Distributor of the Year’ award from HP, despite the increasingly challenging business environment since the pandemic. The award further validates our position in the industry, our strong expertise. and the exceptional value we offer our customers in the region. We would like to thank HP and all our customers for their continuous support.”

Mitsumi is HP’s authorised distributor in the Middle East for HP Computing (PC/ Laptops) and HP Supplies and in Africa for HP Computing, HP Print, and HP Supplies.

Forayed into the distribution business since 2009, Mitsumi has expanded its portfolio to include leading tech brands.

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NEWS //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

available from Dynamic Boost.

The original Zephyrus G14 turned heads by balancing performance and portability in a sleek and stylish package. The 2021 edition builds on that foundation with updated components that enhance gaming and more. The latest Zephyrus G14 is supercharged with up to a Ryzen 9 5900HS processor. It’s available with GeForce RTX 3050 Ti and GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPUs that make RTX graphics technologies attainable for every gamer.

ASUS Unveils Gaming Laptops with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 and 3050 Ti Laptop GPUs ASUS has announced that the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti and GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPUs are offered in a diverse family of ROG and TUF Gaming notebooks, making RTX enhancements and performance available to a wider audience than ever before.

The ROG and TUF Gaming laptops powered by the new GPUs serve up the latest processors, immersive displays, quiet cooling, and bold designs, accommodating users of all stripes—from those who need a versatile ultraportable that can do anything to gamers who demand a captivating powerhouse with a large display.

These new Laptop GPUs are powered by the Ampere architecture, the second generation of NVIDIA’s RTX technology, which combines new streaming multiprocessors with 2nd gen RT cores and 3rd gen Tensor cores to enable the most realistic raytraced graphics and advanced AI features.

These improvements enable lifelike visuals while pushing frame rates to new heights. They’re backed by support for NVIDIA Reflex technologies that lower latency in select multiplayer games and NVIDIA Broadcast effects that add instant polish to live streams.

The GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPUs bring RTX enhancements and performance to everyone. The updated TUF and ROG laptop lineups offer these GPUs in diverse range of designs to suit different needs. ROG laptops pair the GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPUs with the latest generation of CPUs, including 11th Gen Intel Core and AMD Ryzen 5000 Series processors. ROG Intelligent Cooling technologies help to extract maximum performance from these cutting-edge platforms.

The first ROG gaming 2-in-1, the ROG Flow X13, is the perfect landing place for the GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti. This ultraslim 13-inches convertible notebook boasts an AMD processor up to the eight-core Ryzen 9 5980HS, yet it’s a mere 15.8mm thin and weighs only 1.3kg. Despite the ultraportable form factor, an efficient cooling system allows the RTX 3050 Ti to clock up to 1135MHz at 35W with ROG Boost, with another 5W available from Dynamic Boost. Configs with the GeForce RTX 3050 run that GPU up to 1157MHz at 35W with ROG Boost, and they can draw another 5W through Dynamic Boost.

Gamers use their PCs for a wide range of activities that extends beyond gaming and into creating. The ROG Zephyrus M16 is built to be just as versatile. It starts with a captivating display framed by super-narrow bezels on all four sides. The immersive 94% screen-to-body ratio fits a 16” screen inside a slim chassis that’s smaller than last year’s 15” Zephyrus M15. For fluid, richly detailed visuals in games, the panel combines a high WQHD resolution with a fast 165Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time. The display is also an ideal canvas for artists thanks to a taller 16:10 aspect ratio and Pantone-validated colors across 100% of the cinema-grade DCI-P3 color gamut.

Next-gen components give the Zephyrus M16 the performance to tackle any task.

The latest processors up to an 11th Gen Intel Core i9-11900H drive high-refreshrate gaming and deliver multithreaded muscle for content creation, while GeForce RTX 30 Series Laptop GPUs supply formidable graphics power. The GeForce RTX 3050 Ti runs at up to 1585MHz at 60W with ROG Boost, with another 15W

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With a precise balance of power and portability, the ROG Zephyrus G15 offers accessible versatility for gamers and creators. It wears the same shimmering aesthetic as the Holographic G14 but makes room for a larger 15” display. The WQHD panel with a 165Hz refresh rate and quick 3ms response time relieves gamers of having to choose between greater detail and faster performance. Full coverage of the wider DCI-P3 color space enables vivid, lifelike color that’s factory calibrated and Pantone Validated to ensure accuracy.

The new ROG Strix G15 and G17 offer exciting options built for play. Original Black and Eclipse Gray variants both have a diagonal dot-matrix design across the keyboard deck and aluminum-capped lid, while Electro Punk makes a bolder statement with Coded Puzzle aesthetic and speckled pink accent. All three let users pick their own colors with a wrap-around light bar and keyboard illuminated by Aura Sync.

New for 2021, the TUF Dash F15 is engineered to make thin-and-light gaming a reality for everyone. Its super-slim design is lightweight and easy to carry. The latest processors up to an 11th Gen Intel Core i7-11370H CPU join forces with GeForce RTX GPUs to blitz through games, with power to spare for serious work. Cooling upgrades borrowed from ROG laptops help to get the most out of the hardware.

The combination of 11th Gen Intel Core CPUs and GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs prime the new TUF Gaming F15 and F17 for gamers who demand powerful components, sensible style, and reliable performance at an accessible price. Comprehensive cooling lets those processors achieve their full potential. The GeForce RTX 3050 Ti runs at up to 1585MHz at 60W with ROG Boost, with another 15W available from Dynamic Boost, while the RTX 3050 ramps up to 1600MHz at 60W with GPU Boost, with an extra 15W on tap via Dynamic Boost.

Juniper Networks Launches Juniper Security Director Cloud

Juniper Networks has announced that the company is continuing its investment in the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) market with the introduction of Juniper Security Director Cloud, a cloud-based portal that distributes connectivity and security services to sites, users and applications, as well as manages customers’ SASE transformations. Technology disruptors, such as 5G and an increasingly distributed workforce, are changing how organizations do business and architect their networks.

Juniper Security Director Cloud bridges organizations’ current security deployments with their future SASE rollouts by providing security that is managed anywhere and everywhere, on-premises and in the cloud, from the cloud. Benefits include: •

•

•

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Experience-led management to facilitate network transformation. Security Director Cloud delivers a transformational management experience that reduces overhead that is inherent in architectural shifts and distributed security delivery.

Unified policies across physical, virtual and cloud-based security. Customers can create security policies — including user- and application-based access, IPS, anti-malware and web security policies — that follow users, devices or applications as they move to new locations, and automatically apply Validated security effectiveness. Juniper provides cyberattack protection that has been validated by objective, third-party testing to be more than 99% effective against network and application exploits, new and commodity malware, IoT botnets and other attack techniques targeted at the edge and in the data center.

Visibility into threat behaviors across the entire network with Security Director Insights. Security Director Cloud features correlated visibility into attacks across the network by bringing together threat detection information – including detections from other vendors’ products – into an attack timeline, and it enables onetouch mitigation to quickly address gaps in defense.

Huawei Calls for Closer Public-Private Sector Cooperation to Restore Trust in Tech Catherine Chen, Corporate Senior Vice President and BOD Member at Huawei, has underscored how building trust in a digital society will require the joint efforts of policymakers, regulators, and the private sector. Her comments came during a speech at the St. Gallen Symposium, an annual gathering of current and future leaders from across the globe. The annual gathering of current and future leaders celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, welcoming 1,000 participants in the three-day cross-generational dialogue.

Chen joined political leaders and representatives of transnational organizations to exchange their views on the theme of this year’s symposium, “Trust Matters”.

“As more devices feature connectivity, more services go online, and more critical infrastructures rely on real-time data exchanges, so must governments worldwide ensure that everyone is protected by the highest security standards. Only a common set of rules can guarantee a level of security that creates trust in technology,” Chen said.

The event’s participants agreed that trust is inherently built on openness and transparency, and that it is time to take concrete, actionable steps to address the common challenges and risks that have emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We, as members of the

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younger generation, are connected to a greater number of people through social media, but this does not correspond to a circle of people we can trust,” said Simon Zulliger, a member of the team of 35 students from the University of St. Gallen that organized this year’s symposium.

Chen hoped that the next generation of leaders would build trust and shape a world of pervasive connectivity. “I urge them to continue developing the positive relationships between communities, individuals, and their environments. We must build strong trust in technology, enabled by a common set of rules, innovations, and progress. Only then can we commit to the sustainable and trustworthy use of technology,” she concluded.

Chen’s comments echo the company’s recent reaffirmation and commitment to supporting digital transformation across the Middle East by building stronger cybersecurity mitigation programs with local partners and governments.

That commitment comes at a time when the overall spending on information and communication technology (ICT) in the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa region is expected to make a comeback, returning to positive growth of over $209.5 billion in 2021 after contracting last year, according to projections from IDC.

CHANNEL TALK //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

through the calendar year.

HP Extends First of its Kind Partner Program to Global Retailers HP Inc. has announced the extension of HP Amplify — a first-ofits-kind global channel program — to its vast ecosystem of more than1350 online pure players, omnichannel, and brick-andmortar retail partners. Launched in the fall of 2020 to commercial partners, the powerful new partner program, built on a single, integrated structure provides the insights, capabilities, and collaboration tools needed to drive digital transformation and growth as consumer buying behaviors continue to evolve. HP will begin to transition retail partners to the HP Amplify program beginning August 2, 2021, and continue

Built on a simplified and easy-to-navigate structure with two distinct retail tracks (Synergy and Power including Power CDR Retail targeted at retail sub-distributors), HP Amplify is designed from the ground up to turn data analytics into insights that spark new strategies, steer innovation and reward partners for performance, collaboration and capabilities while accelerating digital transformation with insights, building a data driven culture and augmenting common knowledge with collaboration tools.

“For the IT industry overall, and the retail channel specifically, it is clear that business as usual is no longer an option. HP Amplify not only makes it easier for retail partners to do business with HP, it provides a clear path, built on a proven framework, to transform their business for today while enabling long-term sustained growth in the future,” said Christoph Schell, Chief Commercial Officer, HP Inc. “Together with our partner community we are reinventing how consumers experience our products and services, by investing in our shared capabilities while developing new areas of strength to remain competitive.”

With CyberKnight as VAD, RiskIQ Middle East Business Grows 132% YoY RiskIQ has announced additional investment in its Middle East operations. Fueled by revenue growth across the region of 132% in 2020, RiskIQ recently relocated Henry Staveley, Regional Sales Director to Dubai and is currently undertaking additional recruitment activity. In late 2019 RiskIQ partnered with the value-added-distributor CyberKnight Technologies, and together they quadrupled the number of RiskIQ resellers across the region in 2020.

“You can’t protect what you can’t see! That is why we partnered with RiskIQ. The platform enables enterprise and government customers to truly understand their attack surface. This is critical because when an attacker targets an organization, they will look for any possible opening. Without understanding what they can see, security teams will not be aware of the potential vulnerabilities that can be compromised and become attack vectors.”, said Avinash Advani, Founder and CEO of CyberKnight. “With the investments being made in the region by RiskIQ, we have already observed accelerated market penetration in H1 2021 and expect rapid customer acquisition, as well as revenue growth in due course.”

Commenting on the regional expansion, Fabian Libeau, RiskIQ’s VP and General Manager of EMEA, said, “While the Middle East has been a successful market for RiskIQ over several years, digital transformation initiatives, Covid-19, and the increased activity of threat actors across the region have made our solutions more relevant than ever. With these additional resource investments, we look forward to helping a growing number of Middle East organizations proactively defend themselves against cyber threats and threat actor groups.”

Vertiv Opens New Factory in Croatia to Fulfill the Demand for Integrated Modular Solutions Vertiv has announced the opening of a new factory in Rugvica, Croatia to support its integrated modular solutions (IMS) business in EMEA. Compared to the previous factory, the site offers 130% more indoor space and 60% more outdoor space and can easily be expanded to seize the opportunities of the rapidly growing prefabricated modular data centers (PFM) market. The factory also includes a number of innovations for the construction of PFM modules as well as thermal management air handling units.

“We hear a lot about IT trends and the upcoming advances in technologies such

as of 5G, IoT, and AI, but less about the innovative physical infrastructure that’s behind it,” says Giordano Albertazzi, president for Vertiv in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). “We are seeing strong growth in the adoption of prefabricated modular solutions to support these new technologies, and as market leaders we are investing both in capacity and innovation to continue to meet our customers’ needs and stay ahead of the curve. This new site ultimately means supporting the plans and enabling the success of our EMEA and global customers, and is reflective of our continued investment in the markets in which we operate.”

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“The Rugvica factory boasts all the latest technologies, production processes, tools and testing labs,” says Viktor Petik, VP for Vertiv’s IMS business in EMEA. “The facility is designed to provide a complete range of prefabricated modular solutions, from cable landing stations powering the internet and connecting geographies, to bespoke data centre building blocks. The new factory testifies our commitment towards innovation and growth, and I am proud to say that we’ve created about 150 jobs in the last year, many being engineering or skilled professionals from this region.”

Kaspersky Strengthens West African Footprint As part of its strategy to grow its business in West Africa, Kaspersky has partnered with value-added distributor DataGroupIT who will provide the global cybersecurity company with access to new markets in Nigeria and Ghana. “DataGroupIT is a well-known distributor in Africa with a clear value-add when it comes to generating focused business growth, especially in the enterprise segment.

It also has the capacity to support the Kaspersky business logistically and provide valuable technical expertise on Kaspersky solutions,” says Lehan van den Heever, Enterprise Cyber Security Advisor for Kaspersky in Africa.

DataGroupIT has more than 1 000 clients in over 15 Sub-Saharan African countries with its professional teams delivering exceptional sales, pre-sale, logistic, marketing, and financial support. The partnership between the two organisations will further enhance Kaspersky’s rapidly expanding footprint in Africa. It is designed to empower customers to leverage Kaspersky’s knowledge, market intelligence, and world-class cybersecurity professionals with best-in-class local market support.

“West Africa is becoming a major focus for Kaspersky. The agreement with DataGroupIT will see Kaspersky gain access to new verticals in this region while helping new and existing customers build their cybersecurity strategy. It also puts Kaspersky in a position to work with major regulators to elevate the digital protection threshold across the region,” says van den Heever.

Amir Shtarkman, VP Business Development at DataGroupIT says; “Our partnership with Kaspersky is an excellent fit for our growing product portfolio, and our ‘6 pillar model’.

Kaspersky is an experienced vendor and a leader on their product portfolio. Their offerings will enable our customers across the region to realise the benefits of cybersecurity and, in particular, endpoint protection and cyber intelligence. DataGroupIT has a wealth of experience in the cybersecurity market in Africa, and we are looking forward to growing the Kaspersky business with this partnership.”

With the DataGroupIT partnership in place, Kaspersky plans to replicate the success it has observed in other African regions. “This expansion will help move the maturity of cyber defense tools and processes in West Africa to a new level especially at a time when organisations and consumers are adapting to a new distributed working environment that creates the potential for additional cyber risk,” concludes van den Heever.

AVEVA and Maire Tecnimont Group Sign Strategic Partnership AVEVA has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor Tecnimont, a subsidiary of the Maire Tecnimont Group, a leader in the global natural resource processing industry, to create new digital predictive and prescriptive maintenance services that drive enhanced business outcomes. This partnership will extend usage of AVEVA’s Asset Performance Management (APM) solutions across the Maire Tecnimont Group, globally, enhancing plant operability and lowering maintenance costs.

ment suite is well positioned to advance industrial operations of the future. By enabling companies to predict failures before they occur, we are helping to reduce unplanned downtime as well as drive efficiency and safety throughout plant operations. We are excited about the partnership with Maire Tecnimont and look forward to supporting our joint customers in overcoming today’s industrial challenges by leveraging human experience with artificial intelligence.” commented Kim Custeau, Vice President, Asset Performance Management, AVEVA.

This will in turn deliver increased information availability empowering better, more informed decision-making, and ultimately improving overall business performance. As part of the agreement, the two companies will work together over a twelve-month period on a defined number of customer projects to promote the application of predictive maintenance technology for critical plant assets.

As an EPC contractor and global leader in the transformation of natural resources, Maire Tecnimont will leverage its unique process, automation, and maintenance competencies to supply plant owners with perfectly customized digital products and solutions that are tailor-made for their maintenance needs. The combination of Maire Tecnimont’s proven market experience and AVEVA’s leadership as an industrial technology provider will deliver improved analytics which in turn will help to reduce inefficiencies, optimize operations, and improve our customer’s profitability.

“Digital transformation is one of the technology drivers most needed to give our industry a much-needed boost. This MoU with AVEVA aligns seamlessly with Maire Tecnimont’s strategy for digital transformation: it complements our value proposition which focuses on NextPlant, our new digital services and solutions portfolio that has been designed to fully meet customer’s needs, while simultaneously improving our operational model through the creation of digital enablers,” commented Pierroberto Folgiero, CEO Maire Tecnimont Group.

“AVEVA’s Asset Performance Manage-

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With this MoU, Maire Tecnimont Group has reached a new milestone in its digital transformation journey, with the activation of a new technology-enabled value stream which is a crucial part of its roadmap. To achieve its drive to become the ‘contractor of the future’, Maire Tecnimont is enhancing overall value for plant owners through a suite of advanced digital products and services geared towards EPC customers.

MOVERS AND SHAKERS //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

Qualys Board Names Sumedh Thakar as CEO Qualys has announced that its Board of Directors has named Sumedh Thakar as President and Chief Executive Officer. Sumedh, long-standing Qualys executive and chief product officer, was previously Interim CEO. “After careful consideration, the board has concluded that Sumedh is the right leader to take Qualys into the future. Given his tenure with the company and his steady guidance since taking on the role of interim CEO in February, we have complete confidence that he can rally the company to execute on our vision,” said Sandra E. Bergeron, Qualys’ Lead Independent Director. “As he moves into the CEO role, we have the unique opportunity to leverage his deep knowledge of the company and the market to enable him to move us forward with speed and agility.”

SHAREit Group Gets New Sales Director for GCC Operations SHAREit Group has confirmed the appointment of Mrwan Gharzeddine as the new Sales Director for related activities across the GCC. With extensive experience in the digital advertising segment and a comprehensive understanding of the regional market, Gharzeddine joins SHAREit Group with a proven track record of meeting sales targets, influencing key stakeholders, and maintaining excellent relationships with agencies and partners. Moving forward, he will oversee all sales operations across the GCC, utilizing his leadership skills and passion for digital advertising to lead development projects, secure new business opportunities, meet sales objectives, generate revenue, and further grow SHAREit Group’s regional profile.

“I am delighted to be joining SHAREit Group as Sales Director for the GCC,” said Gharzeddine. “In recent years, SHAREit Group’s influence and impact across the region and beyond has grown dramatically. Sustained success in eliminating digital content limitations, supporting clients, and facilitating access for users to discover and consume diverse, high-quality content has seen the company’s popularity continue to rise, and the coming period is one full of potential

from a brand standpoint. As such, I am looking forward to working with our internal teams to realize our aspirations and make a real difference. Sales success is an integrated operations model component for every business, and it is important for us to continue capitalizing on our strong momentum to ensure that we exceed every requirement.”

A Business Marketing graduate from California State University, USA, Gharzeddine joins SHAREit Group with almost two decades of sales experience. Since pursuing his sales career in 2004, he has applied an entrepreneurial mindset in each of his previous roles, effectively managing and mentoring diverse teams of sales managers and junior representatives.

His most recent position was Digital Advertising Lead at dubizzle.com, the UAE’s leading buying and selling platform. During his six-year tenure, Gharzeddine successfully led partnership programs with agencies and clients, securing annual budgets, nurturing external relationships, and securing $1.7 million in revenue per year.

Prior to this position, he also flourished as Digital Sales Manager at Chill Media, Business Development Manager at MobiComputing, and Business Development Executive at Ipsos.

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Sumedh has been with Qualys for nearly 20 years in various positions starting as a software engineer. Since 2014, he has served as Chief Product Officer overseeing product strategy and leading the transformation of the Qualys Cloud Platform from a single security solution to an evolving portfolio of integrated apps that deliver 360-degree visibility across on-premises, endpoints, cloud, containers, and mobile environments providing the visibility businesses need to assess critical security intelligence and to automate the full spectrum of auditing, compliance, and protection for IT systems and web applications. As president since 2019, Sumedh has been deeply involved in expanding Qualys’ go-to-market strategy and building and driving the sales and partner teams to expand Qualys’ addressable market and drive customer retention and revenue growth.

“I have been fortunate to be part of Qualys’ journey of innovation from the early days when Qualys started as one of the first cloud-based security solutions. We’ve made great strides since then, expanding our cloud platform to address the security and compliance needs of today’s modern IT infrastructure,” said Thakar. “I’m thankful to the Qualys board and excited to have the opportunity to take Qualys to the next level and lead the incredibly talented global Qualys team. I look forward to continuing to accelerate innovation, advancing our go-to-market strategy and creating value for our customers and shareholders.”

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

// INTERVIEW

STEM IS ALL ABOUT SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL LEARNING Peter Lacey, the Commercial Head for MEA at Acer Middle East, speaks about the challenges faced by the education sector, how these challenges can be overcome and the way forward for the industry How has the pandemic affected the education sector in the region?

The single biggest change has been the environmental one. With schooling moving from a classroom to a home setting in 2020, teachers have had to adapt to a new way of delivering lessons and parents have had to turn into ‘assistant teachers’. The need for educators to be able to teach, communicate and interact with students drove hardware sales but it came with a steep learning curve. Schools that already had a one-to-one strategy (one student, one device) going into 2020 benefited from not having to adapt to and learn new teaching methodologies. Connectivity became the buzzword and of course, the Wifi capability of a device became more important than the processor.

ful, as the best practices these teachers were sharing with each other over the course of three years, were being put into practice due to online learning. They were quickly able to transfer these skills across their schools and upskill their staff to work in this new environment.

In light of this, the Acer TMB311 flourished as we never compromised on the quality of product and provided the latest Wi-fi technology in all our student and teacher devices. Acer also understood that the amount of time which would be spent in front of a screen was going to increase dramatically, so our devices come with Acer Bluelight technology to assist with protecting eyesight. Anti-microbial solutions were also introduced on the surface of the chassis, the touchscreen, top cover, keyboard, and touchpad. With this, devices can stay cleaner longer and will not require regular alcohol scrubbing or specialised covers.

Is there a digital disconnect despite tech tools being available for distance education?

The disconnect is more about how students use the internet when directed by their teachers or school as opposed to the same educational usage outside of the school environment. With so many control measures in place to protect students in the school environment the restrictions to their freedom of access to information can lead to quite the opposite: misinformation, false reports, cyber bullying and dystopian views of society.

What sort of opportunities do you see in the regional education sector?

In 2018, Acer began an Innovative School program that brought together teachers from across the Middle East and Europe and gave them a platform to share best practices and learn from each other. In 2020, these relationships became fruit-

As schools start to open up in the region, we will continue to strengthen these relationships and identify how through technology, we can together offer an innovative hybrid learning experience. We will continue to work closely with our partners like Adobe and Magix, which will result in us being able to propose curriculum development courses and look at internship programs that will deliver new skills to students in a safe and controlled environment.

How can this digital disconnect be bridged?

This can be achieved through freedom of access in a controlled environment. This will be difficult to achieve and will rely on machine learning to gradually expand the horizons of students and their access to material online that will enhance the education experience.

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STEM has risen as the go to stream of education during the pandemic. What importance does STEM have in developing the skillsets of a student?

STEM is really about social and emotional learning, often referred to as EQ (Emotional Intelligence). With students being away from the classroom environment, STEM could give opportunities to reinforce the teaching experience. It should help develop and enable them to apply skills (creative thinking) to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve goals, maintain positive relationships and increase problem-solving abilities in real-life situations.

This topic is difficult to cover in detail in a short question but how it relates to technology is easier to see. By offering project-based work, STEM has allowed students to explore independently of the teaching environment. My belief is that we are developing “thinkers” who will be able to solve the problems of the future. Acer for Education is driven by the by innovation, engagement and empowerment and this is reflected in the high quality of our devices. With a focus on quality stylus and screens, Acer is not limiting the learner’s ability to create and deliver projects conceptualised in their minds.

Acer gives them tools to effectively bring those thoughts and dreams to life.

Do you provide solutions today to make STEM learning a seamless experience?

At Acer, we are continuously looking to partners, particularly in Maths and Science, who are developing applications and software that test the critical thinking of students. For example, projects like Scottie Go!, a simple robotics program for young learners, has the ability to get students thinking laterally.

GISEC 2021 //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

BUSINESSES ARE LOOKING FOR SAFER STRATEGIES TO BE ONLINE Rohit Bhargava, the Practice Head for Cloud and Security for Cloud Box Technologies, speaks about the evolving security threat vectors in the region and how companies can mitigate those risks

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Can you tell us about the security threat landscape in the region? How has it evolved over the months?

Well much of the world we live in is driven by online engagements. There are more transactions happening online and people are collaborating over the internet. This introduces a very big attack vector. Because of this, what is happening today is that most of the people are concerned about protecting their digital assets and protecting their identity. This is introducing a lot of risk in their environment. As a result what we have seen is that businesses are trying to be a little more proactive in their approach of protecting data and users. Thus, they are talking to their employees and making sure the basics of the security is taken care.

There are four categories of attacks primarily that we have seen. We see denial of services - a very common attack vector. Then we have man in the middle phishing and malware. We also see a lot of attacks happening through emails and not to forget the attacks which are emanating from social engineering. So this is taking the benefit of the current situation and we see all these different digital channels are being used to propagate such kind of attacks. So as a result, businesses are looking for safer strategies to be online and if you look at the entire threat landscape over the past few months, you would see cyber breaches and cyber crimes are on a rise exponentially.

How is Cloudbox equipped to handle those challenges?

Well, that's an interesting thing because work from home was always there. However, the percentage of users sitting at home and working have increased. But what we have seen traditionally is people who are working from home, lack complete skill set to be able to manage their endpoint devices. So as a result they are facing a lot of operational hassles. We talk to customers day in and day out and they tell us that managing the workforce remotely is also a challenge. They want to make sure proper monitoring tools are also put in place. But what we do differently as Cloudbox is our threat hunting proposition to protect the workforce.

Management is really coming to

the rescue here. We measure not only the employee productivity, but at the same time we focus on the endpoint protection - the machines and the devices that they are using.

This helps us in an overall 360 degree aproach keeping data protection strategy at the center. So whether it is data in motion, data in use, or even data which is being continuously accessed, all these are protected.

How has ransomware evolved during this period?

Ransomware has evolved drastically - it's a known attack vector and it's been doing a lot of damage to the society overall. But what we have seen interestingly is it's not just the encryption of the data and then taking the ransom from it. It's the data exfiltration and the threat of data being released online on the internet.

That's something which is posing a lot of threat to the companies and corporate employees, who are very concerned that their identity and their privacy is not compromised.

Some instances where we have seen ransomware using a shared code or a shared infrastructure is to make the attack little more directed. They do this not just focusing on one machine but on a set of machines on the network. So this makes the attack a little more complex. At Cloudbox, we have learnt all these attack vectors and we learn every day from the recent attacks that are happening everywhere.

Our continuous solution of managed services is offered through a 24x7x365 monitoring and measuring initiative. We want to make sure that our managed services offer customers data that is accessible, that is secure, and that is available all the time. All of our services are also making sure that there is a sense of security awareness to the users of the network and this makes it sure that we have a protection from the users as well as from the devices.

How are companies overcoming digital security and privacy challenges at this time?

Companies are adopting a multi-faceted approach. There is no one solution to such a kind of environment.

There is a big data sprawl across various digital channels and devices.

This data sprawl invites attacks to

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happen easily. If it's not today, it will be tomorrow. But that requires a careful consideration overall. We see that companies are using attribute based access control. This kind of control enables dynamic and effective way of managing the data.

Companies are also using identity access and management. These kinds of tools helps engage and keeps a proper balance between customer experience and the privacy.

However, previous data privacy has been become a product. Customers' identities are being sold online - so that's where this request for a centralised identity as a service solution and the cloud is playing a bigger part.

So companies who have got technology at the center of their strategy, their business planning strategy have become resilient to such a kind of pandemic. We increasingly think that these kind of business planning and these kind of customers who have technology centered around would sustain their business. There is an inherent culture of cyber hygiene that can come if the companies have proper technology investment towards digital transformation.

Bear in mind, technology digital transformation, smart initiatives, paperless initiatives, and so on, are all different ways through which companies can get work done efficiently. But it can also become little more compliant to these changing internet laws and data privacy laws.

What are the cyber security trends for 2021?

Well among the big trend setters, everybody is talking about cloud, AI, and 5G. I feel all these three technologies are tied up into three specific areas: automation, on-demand services, and digital transformation. All these three technologies are very rampant across all the verticals. But if you talk about cyber security, there's a different thing happening altogether.

Customers from SMB to enterprise are looking at identity based systems. I see an increasing demand for password management tools. I see an increasing demand for password less multi-factor authentication and this is driving a lot of requirements.

GISEC 2021 //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

YOUR SECURITY STRATEGY SHOULD MATCH THE CURRENT OPERATING ENVIRONMENT Lara Yousuf, the Partner Manager at Mimecast, speaks about how digital economies can be secured

How has the security threat landscape evolved over the past few months?

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the market significantly and both security and compliance capabilities are challenged in the work from home and now hybrid work phenomenon. Cybercriminals have taken advantage of the uncertainty to accelerate their

phishing, impersonation and ransomware attacks on organisations.

According to Mimecast’s report titled “Arabian Peninsula as a Cyber Innovator and Associated Cyber Risk to Resilience in the Region”, researchers observed a month on month increase in malicious files detected in the region over the course of 2020.The report highlighted how between March

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and April - when COVID-19 first began spreading in the region and countries went into lockdown - there was a 93% increase in malicious files detected.

There has been a steady increase in malicious files every month since then.

Spam has remained the most prominent vector across all sectors throughout the region and

malware centric campaigns have been observed to continue quarter over quarter. Threat campaigns are becoming increasingly sophisticated and continue to use a diverse range of malware during the different phases of an attack.

Criminals have capitalised on major events to trick people into clicking on links on topics they’re interested in learning more about. The latest is the large-scale rollout of vaccines around the world where people are looking to get vaccinated as quickly as possible and more likely to click on a malicious link on the subject.

What sort of security challenges are people facing when working from home and how is your company equipped to handle those challenges?

COVID-19 has radically changed the way knowledge workers work. The cybersecurity challenges that they face have changed radically as well.

Remote work was already becoming common even before the pandemic.

What COVID-19 did was accelerate this trend to the point where home and business computing have become thoroughly mingled. This has also exacerbated the risks of a cyberattack. Especially now that the majority of workers in the region are back at work and organisations have adopted a hybrid working model.

This allows cybercriminals to piggyback on workers going to and from the office - going from an unsecure home network to the secure office network.

Social distancing has resulted in a significant increase in digital transfer of content, and increased usage of collaboration tolls and email posing a cyber risk for employees.

People simply are not as vigilant about cybersecurity when they aren’t in the office, as was evidenced

by Mimecast’s ‘The Year of Social Distancing’ report, which found a 3X increase in unsafe clicks (clicks

on malicious URLs in emails) employees worldwide during the time when social distancing and lockdowns were going into effect.

Mimecast’s research on Company-issued Devices revealed that since the start of the pandemic, 61 % of the respondents in the UAE admitted to opening emails they thought looked suspicious while 50% did not report suspicious emails to their IT or security teams. This is compared with the global average of 45% for both opening and non-reporting of emails.

Because attack methods are quickly evolving and growing more sophisticated, targeted and dangerous, traditional security approaches are no longer effective.

Mimecast empowers organisations with a holistic approach to security designed to secure, preserve and continue the flow of information via email. With a multidimensional cyber resilience strategy, organisations can address today’s evolving threat landscape – all from a single cloud platform. Mimecast promotes cyber resilience and cyber security through business continuity tools, advanced email security solutions, a multipurpose archive, and end-user awareness and training to combat evolving threats.

How has ransomware evolved during the pandemic period and what are you doing to tackle the problem?

Ransomware attacks are becoming more and more sophisticated.

According to Mimecast’s latest “The State of Email Security” report, respondents in the UAE identified ransomware as the chief culprit behind disruptions, with 78% in the UAE indicating they had been impacted by ransomware in 2020.

The report also revealed that companies impacted by ransomware lost an average of six working days to system downtime, with 29% of the companies in the UAE saying downtime lasted one week or more.

Ransomware continues to thrive

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and unfortunately most companies are choosing to pay ransoms, making them an attractive target for subsequent attacks.

As an all-in-one service, Mimecast provides protection against a broad range of cyber threats delivered via email, including ransomware.

Mimecast tackles ransomware with a layered cyber resilience solution; bringing together data protection, business continuity, archiving, and recovery capabilities for email from a single cloud solution. This means that not only does it protect organisations from ransomware but in the event that a new and evolved threat manages to breach an organisation’s defences, they are able to recover their data and continue operating their email as usual.

What are the cybersecurity trends for 2021?

In the first few months, we have already seen an increase in ransomware. Mimecast’s “The year of Social distancing” report revealed a 48% increase in threat volume in March 2020 – February 2021 over the previous year. Mass uncertainty due to the pandemic has created plenty of opportunities for threat actors to engineer attacks, for example capitalising on vaccine roll out campaigns.

Even though most organisations in the Middle East are back at work, hybrid working models have become the norm and we expect to continue to see dispersed workforces in 2021. Constant vigilance around employee risk and awareness training is therefore critical.

Productivity and collaboration tools will also continue to be in high demand and organisations will need to ensure they have the right cyber resilience tools in place to protect these channels of communication. Dispersed workforces have also highlighted the importance of cloud security and data stored centrally in the cloud.

GISEC 2021 //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

RANSOMWARE GROUPS ARE TAKING ADVANTAGE OF TODAY'S REMOTE WORKING CONDITIONS John Shier, the Sr. Research Scientist at Sophos, speaks about how ransomware has evolved during the pandemic period

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How has the security threat landscape evolved over the past few months?

Ransomware groups have continued to plague organizations both large and small in their bid to extort as much money as possible out of their victims.

As the cybercrime ecosystem has diversified into specialized operators, each doing their best to grow their stake, we have seen increased activity across all aspects of cybercrime.

Cybercriminals not only continue to take advantage of the pandemic by using it as a pretext for their phishing and scamming campaigns, but we have also seen attacks against remote infrastructure and supply chain compromises affecting thousands of businesses at once.

While there was some good news this year, namely the shutting down of the billion-dollar Emotet botnet, the sad reality is that other criminal enterprises are all too ready to fill the vacuum left behind.

What sort of security challenges are people facing when working from home and how is your company equipped to handle those challenges?

One challenge is that some of the systems and tools organizations were using were not as effective in a remote working scenario as they were in-house.

For example, systems monitoring, and patching issues were exacerbated when offices were inaccessible. Some businesses found it difficult to provide connectivity while others were not prepared to shift to remote working seamlessly.

All these reasons, and more, meant that some businesses were taking temporary shortcuts to enable remote working which led to a worsening of their security posture.

We are addressing these challenges

by not only providing organizations with industry-leading, cloud-native protection products but also making investments in ever more capable AI systems to help security teams be both more effective and proactive, launching products that enable organizations to embrace Zero Trust, and providing help for organizations who lack dedicated security teams through our Managed Threat Response team.

How has ransomware evolved during the pandemic period and what are you doing to tackle the problem?

During the pandemic we have seen continued growth in the social extortion side of ransomware. Most highly skilled ransomware groups have adopted the encrypt and leak extortion scheme pioneered by the Maze group in 2019 and some are even considering an exfiltration only model.

Some ransomware groups have also taken advantage of the pandemic’s remote working conditions to cripple certain organizations, notably educational institutions who rely on remote learning. Overall, there have been less victims in 2020 but the lower volume has been offset by ever more damaging attacks and much higher ransom demands.

How can companies overcome digital security and privacy challenges?

There is no simple answer to this question. It really comes down to understanding the individual requirements of each company and the goods or services they provide. It all starts with an honest appraisal of the current situation within a company.

From there, the business must design a robust security architecture that takes company stakeholders, including business leaders, employees, business partners, and customers in mind.

As for privacy, the simple answer is that businesses should only collect as much data as is necessary

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to deliver the good or service and secure those data in accordance with current best practices.

Do you believe companies today have accelerated their digital transformation initiatives?

Some companies have certainly taken advantage of the pandemic to augment or accelerate their digital transformation plans. Notably, this has meant that more companies have begun adopting a Zero Trust approach to cybersecurity. Not only is Zero Trust more conducive to remote working but it also provides better overall security.

What are the cybersecurity trends for 2021?

Full remote and hybrid working will continue indefinitely, which means businesses will need to formalize their security strategy so that it matches the current operating environment. As such, many organizations will look at making investments in approaches like Zero Trust. On the threat side, all we can say is that criminals will continue to use whatever dirty tricks still work and develop new strategies that attempt to subvert whatever new security mitigations get in their way.

What are the key factors to consider to make sure digital economies of today are secured?

We need to ensure that we have a transparent understanding of how much of our data is collected, how it will be protected, and how it will be used, with a goal to minimizing collection and sharing, while maximizing protection.

We need to evaluate the current state of security critically and honestly in our respective organizations, work to immediately resolve the largest problems, and incrementally improve in all areas of concern. Much like the current pandemic, if we cannot collectively improve our digital immune system by making attacks more costly and cybercrime less profitable, we will forever be plagued by it.

GISEC 2021 //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

COMPANIES ARE STRENGTHENING CLOUD TECH TO ACCELERATE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Amit Hooja, the CEO of NetGraph, speaks about the security challenges faced by companies in the region.

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How has the security threat landscape evolved over the past few months?

It is evident that the brains behind cyber attacks seems to be in overdrive in the last few years. We can expect the number of released vulnerabilities to be almost double compared to the previous years. Also, given the current environment with more people working from home, the organizational permitters have changed and we are witnessing a huge surge in events at individual workstations which are mostly neutralized by our security ops.

But what is now emerging and we are experiencing, is that, the number of security events with our customers has almost quadrupled each month.

What sort of security challenges are people facing when working from home and how is your company equipped to handle those challenges?

In forced circumstances, and since people are working from homes, dorms, shared rooms, etc, there are attacks on enterprise hardware which are otherwise secured by enterprise firewalls. This has given opportunity to hop into the scene and break into other targets within organizations. Under normal circumstances this hardware within physical security would be more trusted and have privileges that would be better than any other networks.

Most of what is currently happening is due to connections via VPN into organizations. Also, the large amount of data being exposed on these machines can be further explored for further attacks. Companies should focus on a lot of endpoint security and deploying Extended Detection and Response (XDR) on user machines. This enables a great amount of behavioral analysis on user machines and protects the machines as well as the network.

How has ransomware evolved during the pandemic period and what are you doing to tackle the problem?

We are seeing much more advanced ways being evolved in the delivery of ransomware, where the vehicles are getting much more innovative and intelligent and are able to detect

the environment and inject appropriate payloads. We are also seeing advancements in how the payloads are delivered and hence staying invisible from most of the otherwise known techniques to detect ransomware. NetGraph initiates a lot of deep ransomware analysis.

How can companies overcome digital security and privacy challenges?

As a Managed Security Service Provider, what we enforce and educate our clients is that the first step is self-realization in the company’s need to lay adequate stress on the organizations’ security. Especially at a time when most companies both the larger enterprise as well as small and medium size businesses are dealing with a huge amount of employee as well as customer data that are prone to threats. Having an in-house CISO or appointing external security operators is important to ensure a healthy security outlook and approach.

They help in analyzing the threat surface, taking corrective action and future proofing the organization’s security. Companies must be more responsible while dealing with data.

We also see is that a lot of startups functioning in a highly competitive environment are in an eternal race to keep customers engaged with new features and implementing new ways of approaching things. All of it is prone to new threats and they need to have firm policies to make security review a part of process from the very beginning. For this we advocate that it is important to have the right people and policies in place who can ensure a secure environment.

Do you believe companies today have accelerated their digital transformation initiatives?

While the world is hit by the COVID crisis there is big shift in the way business is being conducted. Organizations are leaning more and more towards digital and on internet facing platforms. Most traditional businesses had to rush into making quick changes to continue to do business and had to find alternative ways to stay afloat and were in a scramble to recoup revenue losses.

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What is clearly evident is that most companies are now focusing on strengthening and implementing cloud technologies to accelerate their digital transformation. This is mainly to enable remote working conditions as well as to have better processes and systems which will allow them to reap major benefits.

What are the cybersecurity trends for 2021?

Extended Detection and Response (XDR) is the big one as endpoint security has become one of the biggest challenges with increased numbers of people working from home. It is not just that the number of incidents that have grown exponentially, but customers are seeing more advanced attacks and hacks aimed at devices which are connecting to the enterprise via VPN. What XDR allows is a platform to consolidate multiple products and deliver unified security and this form of endpoint security is crucial currently. It tackles a very large number of security services that focus on advanced threat detection and response.

What are the key factors to consider to make sure digital economies of today are secured?

Two of the key areas that need to be in place to ensure strong security are responsibility and agility. Responsibility is not just about having someone in place to tackle the security needs in a digital economy, but more focused on nurturing and guiding both employees and end customers on the importance of security alertness. It is always important to assume networks are compromised and probe deeper rather than proving that the network is hacked. In today’s fast paced world where technology advancements are happening on a daily basis, it is critical to upgrade and not hold on to legacy systems.

On the other hand, security agility includes a 360-degree approach which takes into consideration maintenance, upgrades, legacy code, feature removal, etc. It is also important to avoid being perimeter obsesses, when, at this point employees are constantly on the move and accessing company data from personal devices which are prone to attacks.

GISEC 2021 //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

HUMAN MISTAKES WILL CONTINUE TO INTRODUCE CYBERSECURITY THREATS Mujtaba Mir, the Senior Sales Engineer for META at Barracuda Networks, speaks about the security challenges companies face in the region

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How has the security threat landscape evolved over the past few months?

Barracuda has noticed two major threat trends in recent months.

First, phishing continues to be a preferred attack vector with cybercriminals taking advantage of the ongoing pandemic to increase their success rates. Our researchers found that hackers are increasingly using vaccine-related emails in their targeted spear-phishing attacks.

After pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Moderna announced availability of vaccines in November 2020, the number of vaccine-related spear-phishing attacks increased by 12%. By the end of January, the average number of vaccine-related spear-phishing attacks was up 26% since October.

Simultaneously, we have seen scammers increasingly turn to bots and automation to make their attacks more efficient and effective and help them avoid detection.

Recent analysis of data on web application attacks blocked by Barracuda systems found a massive number of automated attacks, of which the top five attacks – fuzzing attacks, injection attacks, fake bots, App DDoS, and blocked bots - were dominated by attacks performed using automated tools.

What sort of security challenges are people facing when working from home and how is your company equipped to handle those challenges?

The home environment is where many people work now, so it's really important to understand the potential risks involved. The remote workforce brings with it several cybersecurity implications including insecure devices, unpatched systems, insecure network access, an increased risk of phishing and fraud.

We have already seen the spread

of concepts like Zero Trust and micro-segmentation as ways to decrease attack surfaces. These solutions will be part of a broader approach that will create trustbased solutions that will leverage social graphs and machine learning to identify issues and enforce trust relationships.

How has ransomware evolved during the pandemic period and what are you doing to tackle the problem?

Attackers have created many different variations of ransomware over the past few years, such as CryptoLocker, CryptoWall, TorrentLocker, TeslaCrypt, Locky, Petya, WannaCry, Bad Rabbit, and Samas.

Each of these variations use new methods of infecting their victims’ computers, thereby compromising the data and network of many organizations worldwide. Luckily, there are numerous precautions that can be implemented to prevent and recover from a ransomware attack.

A proper ransomware prevention strategy can be summed up into three categories: education, security, and backup. Of these, having a sound backup and recovery plan is usually one of the most overlooked measures in the fight against ransomware, but it is the most crucial.

Successful backups with an effective retention policy enables organizations to recover from ransomware attacks without having to pay any ransom to the attackers, or losing the data altogether. A notable trend with ransomware attacks is that these are now extending to include extortion. To counter this, encryption is going to make a huge comeback this year because of data privacy.

What are the cybersecurity trends for 2021?

Human mistakes will continue to introduce cybersecurity threats:

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Through 2021, we can expect to see many more cases of misconfiguration, especially in the public cloud, where investments will grow the global market by a predicted 35%. The sheer complexity of multiple hybrid cloud environments running side-by-side will outpace the in-house skills needed to adequately secure and manage them.

Organisations will need smarter tools to automatically scan cloud environments for such mistakes and seamlessly remediate any instances of policy non-compliance.

APIs represent a new attack vector: The digital-first businesses of 2021 have increasingly come to rely on APIs to connect to third-party services and enhance application-centric customer experiences.

The challenge is that this further increases the corporate attack surface and provides cyber-criminals with a potentially useful vector to access customer data and back-end services. As APIs are intrinsically insecure, organisations will need to do a better job of layering up security via next-gen web app firewalls (WAFs).

Cloud apps will be the target of attack: Adoption of SaaS collaboration tools rocketed in 2020, while many organisations—from restaurants to banks—also developed their own apps to reach customers more effectively.

The problem is that many apps are being delivered with coding errors that could leave organisations exposed to simple but devastating attacks, like cross-site scripting and SQL injection. IT security teams must therefore continuously scan their systems for vulnerabilities and act quickly to patch where a fix is available. More holistically, they should also look to WAFs to protect their applications.

GISEC 2021 //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

CIOS HAVE ACCELERATED THEIR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION EFFORTS BY ONE YEAR OR MORE Farid Faraidooni, the Chief of New Business and Innovation Officer at du, says that organisations need to consider the right governance model in their security operations, so they can better detect threats and respond

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How has the security threat landscape evolved over the past few months?

Many people working from home have done so using unprotected network environments, personal devices and newly created tools and applications.

They have also carried out their tasks with limited network security while adapting to the new normal, and these elements have collectively resulted in virtual settings becoming an easy target for hackers. This situation, together with a lack of security awareness and education in general, has left people vulnerable to phishing attacks, and social engineering campaigns.

What sort of security challenges are people facing when working from home and how is your company equipped to handle those challenges?

The pandemic meant that entire workforces immediately had to find new ways to work from home and this challenged businesses across the globe. Unprotected home network environments were previously mentioned and, from a cyber-security perspective, organisations have been required to scale up their security response to enable and protect personnel working virtually who were at risk from hackers without impacting productivity.

Organisations have had to rethink their security practices, implementing new levels of security controls outside their respective workplaces. One of the weakest security links in the IT chain are people themselves, as many have not participated in any type of security awareness or education and are subsequently victims of phishing attacks, and social engineering campaigns.

At du, we offer two solutions - Secure Remote Access and Digital Workplace.

Both of these enable employees to securely access corporate resources including email, content and applications, using any device, without hindering productivity nor employee experience.

How has ransomware evolved during the pandemic period and what are you doing to tackle the problem?

How can companies overcome digital security and privacy challenges?

It is clear the pandemic has left people more vulnerable to ransomware attacks. It’s not so much about new levels of sophistication, but rather

around having greater access to people’s environments with less security protecting the endpoints in question.

If we include ransomware and look more broadly across the entire security landscape, there are numerous security best practices that should be considered to build cyber resiliency.

The first is for an organisation to have the right security controls in place, particularly for endpoint devices.

Companies need to ensure they have adequate security processes in place and that the right security controls are followed throughout company procedures, such as improved security set up when onboarding or offboarding new employees.

Secondly, organisations need to consider the right governance model in their security operations, so they can better detect threats and respond.

Ultimately, outsourcing organisational security management to a Security Operations Centre represents the best opportunity to detect threats early, protecting environments both internally and at the edge 24 hours per day, seven days per week.

Thirdly, organisations should adequately educate their employees, which will enable them to identify security threats and reduce exposure. At du, we support organisations with various security consulting services that help them understand their security posture, identify gaps, and provide solutions to strengthen their overall cyber resiliency.

These revolve around strengthening security controls, better protecting endpoints, and offering a complete security operations management service in our Security Operations Centre. This is operational 24 hours per day, seven days per week, and enables fast detection and response to breaches and minimises impacts on organisations.

Do you believe companies today have accelerated their digital transformation initiatives?

In the latest IDC CIO Study, it is clear that 78 per cent of CIO’s have accelerated their digital transformation initiatives by at least one year or more, with digital resiliency, business continuity, and automation the key themes driving faster digital transformation. In the

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UAE, migration to the cloud is a critical leap for many organisations. This is the foundational platform for many digital transformation initiatives, with cloud security also becoming a major focus.

What are the cybersecurity trends for 2021?

In the digital era, the amount of data is exponentially increasing, so are the attacks surfaces and the number of sophisticated attacks. Thus, advanced security technologies such as Security orchestration and automation are key for the future, as is leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to reduce reliance on people and eliminate human error. These emerging trends enable organization to better analyze data to better predict attacks and ultimately prevent them.

What are the key factors to consider to make sure digital economies of today are secured?

One of the biggest recommendations for any organisation securing their digital environment is to rethink the way they approach security. Today, the traditional perimeter, restricted to the office or enterprise data center, is quickly disappearing. Workloads and data are being distributed across multicloud environments. Employees expect to be able to work from home using any device. Today, more than ever, Cybersecurity is no longer confined to IT. In fact, cybersecurity has been elevated to a boardroom topic due to its direct correlation to Trust. According to a Global survey by IDC, 60% of CEOs globally listed Digital Trust among their top 5 priorities. To stay ahead and effectively managed risk, organizations need to initiate a digital trust framework within their organization that focuses on delivering key cybersecurity outcomes including Vulnerability, Identity Management, Trust Management and Threat Management.

Those outcomes can only be achieved if key capabilities covering prediction, protection, detection and response are put in place. Coupled with educating employees well so they are cyber aware, this will make a real difference as the source of most breaches comes from human error due to lack of understanding and awareness.

GISEC 2021 //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

AI HELPS TO STRESS-TEST SECURITY MEASURES TO ENSURE MAXIMUM PROTECTION Ray Kafity, the Vice President for Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META) at Attivo Networks, speaks about the security threats faced by companies in the region How has the security threat landscape evolved over the past few months?

Like everything else, the COVID-19 pandemic is having a direct impact on the increasing cyber risk level.

Remote workforces have increased the attack surface, cloud breaches have increased, and ransomware demands have hit staggering levels.

As we embrace the digital world, the cyber threat landscape chang-

es. We see IoT devices becoming more vulnerable to cyber-attacks and the rollout of 5G, which introduces a new set of security risks.

In the past few months, we witnessed an increasing number of cyber-attacks globally, affecting organisations of all sizes, including Microsoft, SolarWinds, Acer, Sierra Wireless and others. We also saw a significant rise in ransomware attacks and payouts, with

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demands recorded over $50 million.

What sort of security challenges are people facing when working from home, and how is your company equipped to handle those challenges?

Working from home means factoring in a significantly expanded attack surface of devices and unsecured Wi-Fi networks that can make devices directly vulnerable since home Wi-Fi

networks may use weaker security passwords and protocols. Once attackers compromise a system, they will look for vulnerable connections to exploit and gain access to company networks. Security practitioners must also be conscious that employees might use devices that are already compromised when they return to the office.

Reconnecting them to the central network might pave the way for cybercriminals to access the enterprise. Users may also mistakenly store their account credentials on their workstations, leaving them available for attackers to steal and reuse.

How has ransomware evolved during the pandemic period and what are you doing to tackle the problem?

Ransomware attacks increased by an astounding 485% in 2020 compared to 2019, according to Bitdefender’s 2020 Consumer Threat Landscape Report. The pandemic caused most of us to work from home, causing a significant increase in the risk of a successful ransomware attack.

This increase is due to weaker home IT security and a higher probability of users clicking on COVID-19 themed or other persuasive ransomware lure emails. Criminal groups are craftily taking advantage of employees working from home, allowing them to leverage weaker security to insert themselves into the business networks.

Ransomware-as-a-service is also on the rise, making it easier for nonskilled people to become cybercriminals. In addition, cybercriminals have adopted more creative ways to extract payments, like extorting an organisation’s customers for additional payouts. While it is impossible to prevent every possible attack, proper planning and use of lateral movement prevention technologies like deception and concealment technologies could avert a more significant impact on the organisation.

How can companies overcome digital security and privacy challenges?

One of the strongest ways to provide better digital security and privacy protection is to take an identity-first security posture. Instead of thinking about

layered protection at the edge of a network, businesses should start with how best to protect credentials and privileges and provide least-privileged access to data. This approach requires a different level of security architecture and must cover endpoints, Active Directory and cloud environments. A primary place for security teams to start is with protecting Active Directory.

Do you believe companies today have accelerated their digital transformation initiatives?

Companies used to be careful about how quickly they introduced new technology solutions and how advanced they were. However, the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have sped up the adoption of digital technologies by months or even years as they raced to maintain uninterrupted operations.

According to a new McKinsey Global Survey of executives, their companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and their internal operations by three to four years. Additionally, the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has accelerated by a staggering seven years.

What are the cybersecurity trends for 2021?

Like the rest of the world, the cybersecurity industry in the Middle East will witness increased use of AI in applications and in-depth analysis of network traffic to spot anomalous behaviour. AI will also help to stresstest security measures to ensure maximum protection. On the other hand, cybercriminals will also have equal access to AI. They will use it continue to crack codes, break encryption and unlock passwords.

In 2020, the industry and analysts did a big push to educate the world on the benefits of cyber deception. With the increase in sophistication and destructiveness of attacks, it became clear that organisations needed cyber deception capabilities to detect attackers as they attempt to break out and move laterally from a compromised endpoint.

Deception has also gained recognition for its efficiency in detecting exposed and misused credentials, which attackers use in most attacks.

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Although modern deception platform availability began to appear around 2014, many security professionals see 2021 as the “year of deception.”

So-called ransomware 2.0, where humans rather than automated code guide attacks, will continue to increase in 2021. Attackers will take more sophisticated and aggressive paths to gain domain control to inject their ransomware code en masse into systems. Security teams must continue to guard against attacks.

Businesses stabilized working from home in 2020, which seems to continue in 2021, causing a higher cybersecurity risk with employees accessing the network remotely and sometimes using personal devices. Internal security controls must adapt to addressing these increased risks. CISOs and CTOs should immediately assess their VPN and cloud security programs.

They should also put in programs to detect the misuse of a legitimate employee’s credentials and in-network lateral movement, privilege escalation and data collection activities.

What are the key factors to consider to make sure the digital economies of today are secured?

A trusted digital economy could stimulate valuable additional growth for organisations over the years. The Covid-19 pandemic has fueled tremendous growth in internet commerce, and organisations are adopting new and emerging technologies faster than they can address related security issues. The pandemic has also motivated businesses to accelerate efforts to grow their digital presence and speed app development to meet consumers’ demands and expectations as they move online.

This situation comes with inherent supply chain risks if the organization cannot properly vet providers and their software. Just as companies head online to where the consumers are, cybercriminals are doing the same, targeting the weaknesses of these companies. Hence, cybersecurity is emerging at the top of risks companies face in the age of the digital economy.

To meet these threats, organisations must scale up their security efforts.

GISEC 2021 //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

BAD ACTORS ARE INCREASINGLY ADOPTING SOPHISTICATED TECHNIQUES Mohamed Morad, the Senior Solutions Architect – MEA at SentinelOne, says that increasing connectivity and digitalization increase the number of cyber-risks and endpoint protection plays an instrumental role in protecting valuable data and information How has the security threat landscape evolved over the past few months?

In the past few months, the threat landscape has evolved significantly.

We have observed many malware campaigns, spam campaigns, and outright scams that preyed on the fears and uncertainties of the global population. Looking back over the last 12 months, we have seen the cybercrime story unsurprisingly

dominated by social engineering and malware campaigns themed around the COVID-19 pandemic.

But other things were going on this year. From an explosion in RaaS (ransomware as a service) offerings and victim data exploitation with operators like Maze and Egregor, to a unique macOS ransomware/ spyware campaign and, notably, the SUNBURST SolarWinds Orion

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supply chain attack. Bad actors are increasingly adopting sophisticated techniques as well. Modern adversaries are automating their strategies, tactics, and procedures to evade preventative defense. This necessitates enterprise security teams to keep up with attacks by taking a proactive approach and bolster their security posture.

What sort of security chal-

lenges are people facing when working from home and how is your company equipped to handle those challenges?

According to a survey by Gartner, 88% of businesses globally implemented work from home policies due to the pandemic. Remote and hybrid working are still prevalent and will likely determine the future of work. An increased number of remote working staff presents an opportunity for malicious actors to take advantage of compromised endpoints. This is because employees use unsecured devices and often their personal devices while working from home.

Phishing campaigns are also a threat for all employees, whether they are based in-house or remote.

However, staff who are not accustomed to working at home and are now dealing with an increase in email and other text-based communications can easily lose perspective on what is genuine and a scam. To counter these threats, organizations can secure work-from-home computers and provide security awareness training to employees.

More importantly, enterprises should gain visibility to their network and connected devices and adopt a comprehensive automated endpoint protection platform. Ultimately, enterprises can safeguard themselves by having the correct tools and strategies to defend every endpoint against every type of attack at every stage in the threat lifecycle.

How has ransomware evolved during the pandemic period and what are you doing to tackle the problem?

Ransomware attacks continue to pose a threat to modern organizations, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ransomware-as-a-Service is becoming increasingly popular, allowing relatively unskilled bad actors to access complex tools and the environment to run their campaigns. Also, there has been an apparent surge of investment in many of the platforms themselves, upgrading their core ransomware systems to stay ahead of the game and evade detection. The increasing

diversity and total volume enabled

by RaaS and affiliate schemes, along with the low risk and lucrative returns, only serves to suggest that ransomware will continue to evolve and increase in sophistication for the foreseeable future.

Additionally, some ransomware criminals take advantage of the challenges and vulnerabilities created by BYOD, IoT and Digital Transformation initiatives using technologies like social, mobile, cloud and software defined networks. A successful ransomware attack almost always involves a variety of attack vectors, frequently guided by human intervention. Successfully resisting a ransomware attack requires a solution that can neutralize the full range of threats from these vectors. Organizations should adopt solutions that detect and response to such malware by incorporating data analytics and threat intelligence to protect the vulnerable endpoints. AI-powered autonomous solutions can also prevent ransomware attacks by proactively detecting and eliminating them.

Do you believe companies today have accelerated their digital transformation initiatives?

Definitely! Digital transformation means different things to every company – it can be hard to pinpoint a definition that applies to all. However, in general terms, digital transformation integrates digital technology into all areas of a business resulting in fundamental changes to how companies operate and how they deliver value to customers. Digital transformation can mean anything starting from data storage on the cloud, the connection of IoT devices to a company network, migration of documentation and processes to digital platforms and virtual access to applications and services. It means that no matter what organizations do today, it is done digitally.

However, as we are more connected to the internet, and more data is being stored and transferred in digital form, we are subject to more cyber threats.

The key objective for cybercriminals

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is to access and steal our data, and the endpoint (our computers) is one of the entry points to a wider network penetration including cloud, internal and external servers, emails and everything else that represents monetary value for them. Increasing connectivity and digitalization increase the number of cyber-risks and endpoint protection plays an instrumental role in protecting valuable data and information.

What are the cybersecurity trends for 2021?

XDR, Extended Detection and Response, is the evolution of EDR, Endpoint Detection and Response, taking the cyber world by storm.

XDR replaces siloed security and helps organizations address cybersecurity challenges from a unified standpoint. With a single pool of raw data comprising information from across the entire ecosystem, XDR allows faster, deeper and more effective threat detection and response than EDR, collecting and collating data from a wider range of sources.

The shift to a remote workforce in 2020 was one of the single biggest transformations in work for the past 100 years. Items like vulnerability management and visibility on isolated internet-only machines will become a mandatory reality for many companies in 2021. An estimated 41.6 billion IoT devices will be connected to businesses within the next five years. This explosion of connected devices has created a huge – and often hidden – attack surface for threat actors to exploit. Attack surface reduction is a crucial part of modern cybersecurity programs.

Defending a considerable attack surface puts tremendous pressure on enterprise cybersecurity teams. Zero Trust practices hold that no users or devices should be trusted by default, subject all users to verification process and stringent access control. This is a great approach for organizations concerned about who is connecting to what, from where, especially when you compare it to traditional VPNs, which enable much wider access and create security risks.

GISEC 2021 //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

ATTACKS WILL CONTINUE TO DISRUPT REMOTE LEARNING ACTIVITIES OVER THE COMING YEAR Ram Narayanan, the Country Manager for Check Point Software Technologies Middle East, says that businesses should invest in educating users on how to spot and avoid potential security risks How has the security threat landscape evolved over the past few months?

The threat landscape has been rapidly evolving with more sophisticated and targeted attacks. Among the most popular are zero-day exploits and ransomware attacks. The kind of we are experiencing are the 5th generation of cyberattacks: large scale, multi-vector, mega attacks targeting businesses, individuals, and countries.

The most recent Solarwinds supply chain attack was truly unprecedented in its sophistication and scale.

The exploit showed just how insidious and damaging these ‘unknown’ threats can be, where no-one is aware of the flaw apart from the attackers who are exploiting it. The Microsoft Exchange server vulnerabilities incident is another example of a massive attack in which a group

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of highly skilled cybercriminals were actively exploiting four zero-day vulnerabilities in the Server which resulted in a full race amongst hackers and security professionals.

We see two concurrent trends; One, cyberattacks targeting Microsoft Exchange servers were increasing sharply. Two, ransomware attacks were simultaneously rising steadily.

What sort of security challenges are

people facing when working from home and how is your company equipped to handle those challenges?

Remote work and a distributed workspace is the new working reality. This ‘new normal’ has produced several elements that influence the risk and security posture of an organization.

Firstly, the attack surface has greatly increased as in businesses rushed to enable remote access, many companies allowed connectivity from unmanaged home PCs that often lacked basic cyber-hygiene such as updated software patches, anti-malware etc. With remote work as the new standard, remote employees are more prone to careless behavior and non-compliance to corporate policies.

Another challenge us which arises is how cybercriminals benefit from socially engineered cyberattacks that exploit a user’s fear, uncertainty and doubt.

As employees continue to prefer to work remotely, every company now needs to rely more on each one of its employees to guard its data and critical network credentials.

To deal with these challenges, organizations need to recalibrate their cyber security approach around securing their corporate networks and datacenters, cloud environments and employees wherever they are.

Our advice to businesses is to invest in educating users on how to spot and avoid potential security risks – this is the first step to preventing cyberattacks from the start. To boost that effort, Check Point Harmony is designed to help businesses protect remote employees, devices and internet connectivity from malicious attacks, while ensuring secure, remote zero-trust access at any scale to any corporate application.

How has ransomware evolved during the pandemic period and what are you doing to tackle the problem?

While ransomware has only started taking its first steps in the mobile world, it evolved fast in 2020 as malicious actors applied their experience of network ransomware to create mobile variants. Ransomware attacks may have started off simplistic and daring, but today they’ve become a business’ worst nightmare and a criminal’s

cash cow. Cyber criminals know they can make money with ransomware and it’s become a largely profitable industry. Business owners who are unprepared for a ransomware attack won’t bounce back without consequence – if they bounce back at all.

For cybercriminals, ransomware is relatively easy to implement; all it takes is one employee or lax security standard, and you can hold an entire company hostage. For business owners, ransomware is devastating; it can cost upwards of millions of dollars to fully recover from an attack. To tackle this problem Check Point Software Technologies provides Anti-Ransomware solution, which defends organizations against the most sophisticated ransomware attacks, and safely recovers encrypted data, ensuring business continuity and productivity.

Anti-Ransomware is offered as part of Harmony Endpoint – Check Point’s complete endpoint security solution.

How can companies overcome digital security and privacy challenges?

Modern organizations need to recalibrate their cyber security approach around three main elements: Securing their corporate networks and datacenters, securing cloud environments and lastly, securing employees – wherever they are. Achieving complete protection across the expanded attack surface, requires security solutions that deliver: complete security against Gen V, zero-day attacks; solutions that are easy to deploy and manage; and eliminate patchwork security architectures and high TCO with integration and interoperability.

Do you believe companies today have accelerated their digital transformation initiatives?

Absolutely. Digital transformation and technology trends have shaped how we live, communicate, and do business. In the last year, businesses were forced to accelerate their DX efforts to ensure business continuity, ensure efficient customer service, satisfaction and retention and pave the way for future growth. In a recent Gartner CFO survey, 74% of companies said they intend to shift employees to the distributed ecosystem permanently.

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As part of their DX transition, companies have adopted the cloud which offers the resources to enable business model transformation, to deliver services and solutions at a more flexible and faster pace. Organizations are becoming more agile, embracing technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), mobile and cloud computing to scale efficiency and profitability, while remaining competitive at the same time. The “new norm” workspace has expanded the organization’s perimeter as governments mandated lockdowns, organizations transitioned to employees working from home and accessing corporate resources through secure access.

What are the cybersecurity trends for 2021?

In 2021, Covid-19 will still be impacting our lives, businesses and societies, and those impacts will change as the year progresses. So, we need to be ready for a series of ‘next normals’ as we respond to those changes.

Following the rush to remote working, organizations need to better secure their new distributed networks and cloud deployments to keep their applications and data protected.

Attacks will continue to disrupt remote learning activities over the coming year. We’re seeing a weaponization of fake video or audio that employ advanced technologies to create targeted content to manipulate opinions, stock prices or worse. The threat of data leakage has been amplified with contact tracing apps; mobile malware targeting users’ banking credentials and committing click-fraud on adverts is a major growing threat.

As 5G networks roll out, the numbers of connected IoT devices will massively expand – drastically increasing networks’ vulnerability to large scale, multi-vector cyber-attacks. IoT devices and their connections to networks and clouds, are still a weak link in security: it’s hard to get complete visibility of devices, and they have complex security requirements. We need a more holistic approach to IoT security, with a combination of traditional and new controls to protect these ever-growing networks across all industry and business sectors.

GISEC 2021 //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

ATTACK VECTORS CAN COME FROM VIRTUALLY ANY ANGLE Morey Haber, the CTO and CISO at BeyondTrust, says that threat actors today are fully aware of the attack vectors that work best on remote workers How has the security threat landscape evolved over the past few months?

The security landscape over the past few months has evolved from protecting against a breach to having the proper procedures, policies, and disclosures for when a breach occurs. The community has come to an understanding that even with the best tools and diligence, a breach can still occur. We have seen this

happen even with some of the most secure companies and governments throughout the world. Attack vectors can come from virtually any angle and it is not a matter of if they will occur, but rather when they will occur. The security threat landscape has come to the painful conclusion that a proper defense also includes all the steps necessary to triage a breach and notify the appropriate parties when an event occurs. This includes everything

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from a well-rehearsed incident response plan through having attorneys on retainer for when it happens. It is a change of full defense from previous methodologies of strictly protection.

What are the top 3 cybersecurity trends we should be looking out for?

The top 3 cybersecurity trends all security professionals should be looking out for include: • Excessive Account Privileges

•

•

– provisioning accounts with excessive privileges or shared secrets that can be leveraged against a user or application.

Everything should follow the model of least privilege Inappropriate Asset Access – The usage of all assets, applications, and accounts should be monitored for inappropriate usage.

This should include basic traits like first time geolocation access, foreign geolocation access, and simultaneous geolocation access.

API Security – All applications in the cloud should have strict API access regardless of SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS. Usage of cloud-based APIs should be monitored and any new API usage or granted/ denied permissions monitored for appropriate behavior.

What sort of security challenges are people facing when working from home and how is your company equipped to handle those challenges?

While most disaster recovery plans focus on a single catastrophic event, the coronavirus represents a long-term threat that might stretch a disaster recovery model to its brink of coverage.

With this in mind, I have compiled four considerations for how to expand a remote workforce and deal with this threat — potentially for the long haul: 1. Sensitive Data And Privacy: When enabling large numbers of employees to work remotely, CISOs need to consider the exposure of sensitive data and privacy of information flowing to the remote end user’s environment. There are many tasks and transactions that are performed by office employees, and the data should never leave the traditional corporate perimeter.

2. Shadow IT With Free Tools: For some organizations, employees have been asked to work remotely but have not been given the proper tools for a variety of reasons. These include cost, lack of authority by geographic region or simply lack of process.

3. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD): For many CISOs, this is just an unacceptable risk. With no traditional security controls like antivirus or vulnerability assessment on

these employee owned devices, there is no way to mitigate the threats when they are connected and unmanaged. And if these devices are shared among family members, the risk of malware from a simple online game increases exceptionally when the same device is used to connect to potentially sensitive data.

4. Privileged Remote Access: There is a strong chance that if the coronavirus has affected your organization, then some of the employees being asked to work remotely will need privileged access to resources. This means that once they establish a remote session, the credentials they need to access and operate a resource are either administrative, root or power user. If they are entering them remotely, then they are exposed to the local computer, and any malware or attack can sniff them out.

How has ransomware evolved during the pandemic period and what are you doing to tackle the problem?

Ransomware in the pandemic has evolved from threats to ends users (primary through phishing attacks) to sophisticated attacks leveraging advanced exploits targeting hypervisors and exchange mail servers. Threat actors are fully aware of the attack vectors that work best on remote workers but also realize most organizations have defenses to block propagation via VPN or to cloud resources.

Therefore, in order to continue monetizing the threat of ransomware, threat actors have successfully bundled their payload onto vulnerabilities that target critical resources as employees work from home. This evolution of attack provides maximum impact to the business and creates a highly visibility scenario that forces the business to react due a large-scale outage of hypervisors and email.

In order tackle this problem, organizations have embarked on more aggressive patch management schedules and implementing least privilege solutions for human and non-human accounts in order to minimize the expose to these evolving threats. This essentially remediates the risk before a vulnerability can

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be exploited and the threat of ransomware looms over the organization.

How can companies overcome digital security and privacy challenges?

Organizations can overcome digital security and privacy challenges by ensuring a proper separation of duties between the two. There is a common problem in the industry that organizations confuse security and privacy requirements. If these requirements are properly understood, and role delegation and ownership is assigned appropriately, many companies can overcome digital security and privacy challenges despite changes in regional laws and disclosure requirements. Companies must keep them separate and educate team members on the differences and how they complement each other.

What are the key factors organizations should consider to make sure digital economies of today are secured?

There are several key factors organizations should consider in protecting the digital economies that drive today’s business: 1. Data Mapping – organizations should perform an electronic and manual discovery of all sensitive data sets and ensure proper security and privacy controls are in place to safeguard the information in transit and at rest. This includes concepts like encryption and privileged access management.

2. Data Retention – organizations should have an established data retention policy and purge old or obsolete data on a periodic basis to ensure older data sets do not become a privacy or a security liability.

3. Vendor Security – To support a businesses’ digital economy, most organizations rely on a wide variety of vendors. Organizations should secure their supply chains and deploy least privileged access, secure vendor remote access, session monitoring, etc to ensure the vendors themselves do not become the attack vector into your organization.

GISEC 2021 //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

THE CYBERATTACK SURFACE CONTINUES TO EXPAND Giuseppe Brizio, CISO EMEA at Qualys, says that the insider threats are often underestimated but are very dangerous How has the security threat landscape evolved over the past few months?

Digital Transformation, accelerated by the pandemic, has heralded a new reality characterized by the hybrid (remote and mobile) workforces and fast adoption of new technologies (e.g. Cloud Computing, Containers, Enterprise Mobility etc.) which have dramatically increased the cyberattack surface and weakened organizations’ cybersecurity posture. Consequently

the cyberattacks have increased in volume and bad actors have gained higher possibility of succeeding.

Supply chain attacks for instance, are complex and require a lot of resources, but are very attractive to hackers because one successful hacking on a commonly used software gives the attackers a multiplying effect, providing potential access to all the customers using that software. The SolarWinds attack is an example of the supply

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chain risk. As it was the case in 2020, cyber-criminals will continue and increase the focus on remote workers, launching attacks which exploit “stay at home” technology vulnerabilities but also behavioural weaknesses through social engineering. Cybercriminals continue to take advantage of the sudden shift to remote working caused by the pandemic, to launch phishing, ransomware and malware attacks, targeting gaps in security postures, as many organizations were

not really prepared to support a large scale remote workforce, securely.

The insider threats are often underestimated but are very dangerous. Employees might not be the ones facing the consequences but they might be the ones causing the problem by unconsciously facilitating a cyber-attack due to lack of awareness of security policies.

The real threat for many companies has now become the insider because the attacks on businesses and infrastructure can be much easier and more damaging when launched from within, where the security tends to be not as strong.

What are the top 3 cybersecurity trends we should be looking out for?

The accelerated business digitization and the newly digitally enabled business models, means more and more people are doing business online, whether it be remote work or e-commerce.

In addition, with an estimated number of 30+ billion connected objects (IoT) by 2025, the physical and digital world boundaries are blurring, giving hackers a growing number of opportunities to perpetrate cyberattacks and breach cyber-defence. The advent of the 5G means the growing billions of connected objects, and the trillions of related sensors, will connect and interact at unprecedented speeds.

So from my perspective, the cyberattack surface continues to expand.

Therefore, protecting it becomes imperative, via cybersecurity solutions that provide real-time visibility into the IT hybrid environment. You also need to predict and prevent cyber threats from occurring and detect and respond swiftly to cyberattack attempts. Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies will provide more efficient and faster decision making by prioritizing and acting on threats, especially in large IT hybrid environment.

Ransomware and malware have respectively increased by 4x and 3.5x in 2020 compared to 2019, and the average payout of Ransomware is in the neighborhood of US$250K per event. The trend is that cyber criminals are becoming more powerful by sharing cyberattack opportunities on the dark web and also joining forces in coordinated and broader scale cyber-

attack ventures. Cyber criminals are the actors of the “crime digitization” who bring crime from physical to the digital world. Ransomware and malware prevention can be done through cybersecurity education and training, anti-malware programs, phishing awareness campaigns, ensuring timely vulnerabilities patching and user cybersecurity hygiene (e.g. identity management, secure password etc.).

Operational technology in the Industrial Control Systems, keeps developing at a fast pace and are interconnected like never before. This provides new opportunities for the cybercriminals, and we’ve seen Operational Technology cyber threats increase by 3x in the last 12 months. The critical infrastructures in the industrial sectors, but also in healthcare, utilities, transportation etc. could be particularly vulnerable to cyberattack because these infrastructures were not designed to take into account cybersecurity. To protect Operational Technology (OT) from cybersecurity threats, a comprehensive risk assessment and risk-based approach is required, to address vulnerabilities, ensure “security by design” whenever possible and apply zero trust cybersecurity framework.

What sort of security challenges are people facing when working from home and how is your company equipped to handle those challenges?

Depending on the countries and the business sectors, it’s estimated that during Q1 2021, between 50% to 80% of the workforces operated remotely due to the pandemic. Home offices by nature are not as protected as companies’ office sites which are equipped with security infrastructure (e.g. firewalls, routers etc.) and operated by security teams. Remote work has created new opportunities for hackers to exploit vulnerable employee devices and networks. The forced and immediate home office adoption created the “perfect storm” conditions for hackers to take advantage of “staying at home” vulnerabilities such as unprotected personal devices (BYOD) and unsecured networks (Wi-Fi) but also stressful situations when people are confronted with juggling between work and family duties.

The WFH or remote work in general, is also known as the cloudification of

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work, which is, paraphrasing the Cloud, when employees no longer need to be “on premise”, in company office locations, to perform their work duties. Companies have to increase security awareness among their remote and mobile workers, educating them about cyber risks, cyber threats and cyber security hygiene (e.g. preventive best practices).

Security policy should be enforced (e.g. account mgt, password mgt, least privileged access etc.) for WFH users and WFH devices should be protected through an EPP (Endpoint Protection Platform) tool at minimum, providing broader than antivirus cyber-defence.

But additionally, there should also be an EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) solution which provides most advanced layer of endpoint protection by collecting and analysing data from endpoints across a network, so it can stop an attack whilst taking place. Furthermore, once the threat has been removed, EDR can then be used to identify and trace the root causes and the exact source of the attack, to avoid similar events from happening in the future. To give you an analogy, the EPP is like a “shield” from a protection standpoint whilst the EDR is like a “sword” allowing the organization to respond to a cyberattack.

How has ransomware evolved during the pandemic period and what are you doing to tackle the problem?

The volume of ransomware threats grew 4x in 2020 vs 2019, as well as in value, with some estimating that ransomware damage will reach US$20+ billion by the end of 2021. Ransomware officially claimed its first life in 2020 as consequence of an attack on a German healthcare facility. Around 80% of the ransomware attacks do target enterprise organizations and therefore this constitutes a very serious issues for businesses around the world. Training users on the proper ways of detecting and reacting to these threats and using secured email management solutions are effective ransomware countermeasures. If all users know how to recognize a phishing email and make sure it’s signalled to the security team, this can considerably reduce the ransom risk as roughly 50% of the ransomware are introduced via phishing emails.

REVIEWS //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

4/5

AED 4,799

ASUS ZenBook 13 OLED (UX325) ASUS’ new ZenBook 13 OLED (UX325) is being touted by the company as the world’s lightest OLED laptop. The new UX325 is a second refresh of the original ZenBook 13.

While the last refresh introduced 11th-gen Intel Core Tiger Lake CPUs, this refresh now adds an OLED display option.

The UX325 weighs just 1.14-kgs, with the chassis and lids of the device built using diamond-cut aluminum alloy. The ZenBook 13 OLED also boasts a side profile of 13.9 mm. The laptop measures 304-by-203-by13.9mm in dimension, and comes with a larger keyboard than on previous ZenBook 13 models.

You also get an ErgoLift hinge, which raises the keyboard up for a more comfortable angle when the screen is opened. There is also a NumberPad 2.0 alongside the ErgoLift hinge mechanisms and IR cameras for fast face-recognition. The ZenBook 13 OLED has also been tested to meet the ultra-demanding MIL-STD-810G U.S. military standard for reliability and durability.

The laptop features a 13.3-inch OLED HDR display that offers a resolution of 1920-by1080 pixels and a 0.2 ms response time. The display also offers an ultrawide colour gamut of 100% DCI-P3, which is widely used in the motion picture industry, and is PANTONE Validated to provide the most precise colour accuracy for content creators.

The display offers 400 nits of brightness.

You also get 100-percent DCI-P3 colour gamut support, while it’s also TÜV Rheinland-certified for low blue light output. The panel is powered by Intel Iris Xe Graphics and like the original UX325, the OLED model still boasts 88% screen-to-body ratio with full-size connectivity options.

The UX325 is powered by a 11th Gen Intel Core i7 1165G7 processor running at a clock speed of 1.80GHz. You also get 16 GB of memory and 1TB PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD storage. In terms of connectivity, you get two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports that offer up to 40Gbps with 5V-20V Easy Charge. There is also one USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, one standard HDMI 2.0, and one MicroSD card reader rounding off the connectivity options list.

The ASUS ZenBook 13 OLED also comes with a 67 Wh lithium-polymer battery that offers a battery life of up to 13 hours. You also get WiFi 6 (802.11ax) with speeds of up to 2.4 Gbps through ASUS WiFi Master technology and Bluetooth 5.0 wireless connectivity options.

Since there is no 3.5mm audio jack on this one, considering the slim form factor, the ZenBook comes packed with a USB-C to 3.5mm dongle for users who want to connect via a 3.5 mm audio jack. The dongle also has Hi-Res Audio certification to ensure good audio performance. The speakers on this laptop are certified by Harman Kardon.

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Since the ZenBook 13 OLED is powered by an Intel Core i7 processor, 12 GB of RAM, and 1TB of SSD storage, performance is not an issue. Booting up the laptop as well as running various applications were quite fast and lag free thanks to the robust specs. We put the laptop through a variety of real world situations such as editing photos, rendering videos and even gaming. We are glad to report that the device was able to handle all these tasks without any major hiccups even with multiple browser tabs and applications running simultaneously. In terms of the gaming performance, the ZenBook 13 OLED was able to run graphics heavy games without any struggle.

Considering the blockbuster performance it offers, the ASUS ZenBook 13 OLED (UX325) is not your typical ultrabook. It’s a powerful device that offers the visual benefits of an OLED screen in a light and portable build.

You also get good set of connectivity options, strong specs-sheet, and good overall performance.

If you are a road warrior who needs to deal with heavy files and graphics-intensive work, but would prefer a thin and light laptop to carry around in your backpack, the ASUS ZenBook 13 OLED (UX325) should be one of the options you could look at.

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ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

4/5 ASUS ProArt B550-Creator ASUS’ ProArt series has been known for years for quality products aimed at content creators. The company recently announced the new ProArt B550-Creator motherboard, which supports the latest AMD Ryzen series of processors. The motherboard speeds up jobs such as 3D rendering and video post-production, in addition to working with and sharing large files.

In terms of design, the B550-Creator borrows design cues from its earlier iterations such as the ASUS ProArt Z490-Creator 10G, keeping the overall design simplistic with straight lines provided by a pair of rectangular M.2 and an L-shaped power delivery heatsink. The B550-Creator is also the first AMD AM4 motherboard and it benefits from Intel’s updated Thunderbolt 4 controller. You also get 12+2 phase power delivery and dual 2.5 GbE networking.

Keeping in line with its minimalist design, the motherboard also does not come with any integrated RGB LED lighting. In terms of connectivity options, the B550-Creator comes with two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two Intel 2.5G Ethernet, and four USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports. Each of these Thunderbolt 4 ports delivers up to 40 Gbps of bidirectional bandwidth for the latest high-speed devices and drives. Thunderbolt 4 also supports up to two external 4K UHD displays or one 8K display.

Other ports on the motherboard include a

PS/2 combo port, a DisplayPort In connector, an HDMI port, a collection of USB ports, and audio I/O. There is also an 8-pin EPS and 4-pin ATX CPU ProCool II power input combo that provides all the power your processor would ever need.

The motherboard also comes with four DDR4 memory slots for up to 128GB of memory, a pair of M.2 slots using the Asus Q-latch install system (PCIe 4.0 x4), three PCIe x16 and two PCIe x1 expansion slots, four SATA ports, and Realtek’s ALC1220A premium audio solution. You also get a BIOS Flashback Button which can help with troubleshooting along with the Asus QLED POST system.

The AM4 socket on the motherboard can take in AMD Ryzen 5000 Series, 4000 G-Series, and 3000 Series desktop processors.

In terms of performance, the B550-Creator delivers, irrespective of whether the job at hand is video editing, rendering, compiling, or even batch conversions. Since the B550-Creator comes packed with teamed power stages through the use of a 12+2 VRM design and ProCool II power connectors, you get all the power required for the B550-Creator. Meanwhile, two large VRM multi finned/ridged heatsinks, keep the VRM cool.

The B550-Creator also comes with an isolated audio codec, the ALC 1220A featuring shielding, audio-grade capacitors,

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// REVIEWS

$299

and an integrated amplifier. Hence, you get a high-quality audio experience, when listening to music, watching movies, and so on. Furthermore, ASUS’ AiNoise Canceling feature helps in improving audio quality by filtering out noises and distractions whether it be on your mic or incoming audio.

The ProArt Creator Hub on the other hand offers a clean and modern UI for monitoring and management while also offering integration for calibration with ASUS ProArt monitors. In addition, it also simplifies workflows with convenient features such as Task Grouping.

You can also assign multiple apps to a group and launch them simultaneously.

You also get some hardware features such as a pre-mounted IO shield, ASUS M.2 Q-Latch for simple and tool-free M.2 installation, QLED for quick visual POST troubleshooting, and more.

If you are a content creator who needs ultra-fast USB and Thunderbolt connectivity alongside stable and reliable operation, good overall performance under trying conditions, and a boatload of connectivity options, the B550-Creator is the one for you. The ASUS ProArt B550-Creator Motherboard is thus, highly recommended.

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REVIEWS //

ARABIAN RESELLER - MAY 2021

4/5 Samsung Galaxy A52 Samsung’s Galaxy A series of smartphones have always been known for value for money in the mid-range segment of smartphones. The company recently announced its Galaxy A52 smartphone, which offers a refreshed overall design, while offering value for money with a bunch of excellent features. The A52 is available in two variants – 5G and non-5G. The one we have reviewed here is the non-5G variant.

The Samsung Galaxy A52 borrows a few design cues from the company’s Galaxy S series of smartphones. The build quality of the device is top-notch, even though it comes in at a mid-range price point. The phone is available in a bunch of colour options – the review unit we received was the violet variant, which looks quite refreshing.

On the right edge of the device, you will find the volume rockers and the power button, which also doubles up as a Bixby button.

The left edge of the device is clean. On the top edge, you will find the SIM card slot and a noise-cancelling microphone. On the bottom edge, you get the 3.5mm audio jack, USB Type C port, a speaker grille, and a second noise-cancelling microphone. The Samsung Galaxy A52 is also IP67 rated, making it dustproof and waterproof.

On the front, you get a 6.5-inch Super AMOLED FHD+ display that offers a resolution of 1080-by-2400 pixels and a pixel density of 407PPI. The display offers a

refresh rate of 90Hz, which is pretty good for viewing content and playing games. The Galaxy A52’s display can either work at 90Hz or 60Hz based on the settings you choose.

The Samsung Galaxy A52 comes with a quad-camera setup at the back. Now, this includes a primary 64MP Sony IMX686 sensor that offers an aperture of f/1.8. You also get optical image stabilisation, and the sensor supports autofocus. The second camera is an ultra-wide 12MP sensor with an aperture of f/2.2. There is a third 5MP macro sensor that offers an aperture of f/2.4, and a fourth 5MP depth sensor with an aperture of f/2.4. The rear camera allows you to capture videos at 4K@30fps and 1080p@30/120fps. The front camera meanwhile allows you to capture videos at 4K@30fps and 1080p@30fps.

Under the hood, the Samsung Galaxy A52 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G processor. Furthermore, the graphics are handled by an Adreno 618 GPU. The variant we received for review came with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, which can be expanded by using a microSD card.

The Galaxy A52 derives its power from a 4500mAh battery that supports fast charging at 25W. Samsung claims that the battery can charge up to 50% of its capacity in about 30 minutes. The A52 also runs on the Android 11 operating system with Samsung’s One UI 3.1 on top of it.

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AED 1299

The camera of the A52 performs quite well.

Images captured with the 64MP mode in the Galaxy A52 are crisp and clear without any over-saturation. Images, overall, had natural tones and were quite vibrant. boosted. At night or in low-light conditions, the camera’s pixel binning feature adds a good amount of exposure to the image. The Galaxy A52’s camera extends the exposure time even without the Night Mode, taking well-lit night shots. You can see some samples below: The performance of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G chipset on the Samsung Galaxy A52 is quite good. We did not encounter lags or stutters during our review period.

Gaming sessions on the device were also quite fluid, even when running games such as Call of Duty Mobile.

For pricing that starts at AED 1299, the Samsung Galaxy A52 does sound like a good deal. The A52 is indeed a major upgrade over its predecessors. In fact, the refined UI experience may also appeal to those mid-range device users looking to join the Samsung camp.

If you are on the market looking for a budget-friendly smartphone that offers many premium bells and whistles, while also offering good overall performance, the Samsung Galaxy A52 does come across as highly recommended.

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