INTERVIEW / HUAWEI
REINFORCING A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH TO CYBERSECURITY IN AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH ANITA JOSEPH, EDITOR, MIKA LAUHDE, VICE PRESIDENT OF CYBERSECURITY & PRIVACY – GLOBAL PACD, HUAWEI, DISCUSSES HOW HUAWEI WORKS TOGETHER WITH CUSTOMERS, PARTNERS AND OTHER INDUSTRY PLAYERS IN THE REGION TO ELEVATE ITS ICT INDUSTRY TO THE NEXT LEVEL.
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hat are some of the key cybersecurity threats facing the region today? The global challenges we faced as a society last year led to fundamental changes in our physical and digital environments. This caused countries to prioritize resolving internal matters first, and global collaboration against cyberthreats wasn’t given its due attention. This lack of global collaboration has impacted our cybersecurity landscape. Cybercriminals, on the other hand, have become very sophisticated and organised, leveraging cross-border networks to exploit vulnerabilities across the globe. During this time, we also witnessed a rise in remote working, and this presented unique challenges from a cybersecurity perspective. Work devices no longer operated on an organisation’s secured perimeter. Devices that connected to corporate networks through unsecured connections led to vulnerabilities that could be easily exploited by nefarious
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threat actors. Furthermore, IoT and webcams were exploited, with instances of virtual conference hacking (called Zoom bombing) leading news agendas. Cybersecurity teams had to spring into action to serve a dual purpose of ensuring business continuity, and protecting its enterprise network. Despite this sensitive global situation, some state actors used this opportunity to interfere with national security and stability. Some of the common threats we faced were disinformation and phishing. Disinformation was prevalent throughout 2020 because of the pandemic where people obtained news from unofficial sources and, therefore, causing chaos and confusion. In addition, hackers made use of the situation and sent phishing emails masquerading as official authorities on national initiatives, such as financial aid, where the targets were directed to the hacker’s site to collect their personal data. This led to a third threat which was online identity theft and stealing individuals’ money.
Can you share with us some of the best practices that organizations must follow, in order to address these challenges? Humans can be the weakest and strongest link in a cybersecurity landscape. Besides technical adaptations for this new normal, it is now more important than ever that companies build holistic safety and security knowledge among employees to protect both corporate and personal data. This is the key organization’s cyber assurance. Organisations also need to provide new technical tools that allow secured connections while working from homes. This needs to be backed up with an upgraded cybersecurity strategy and policies. For multinational organisations, it is imperative that they quickly agree on global policies, keeping in mind the national regulations and differences. We suggest the adoption of a common, baseline cyber hygiene, which goes back to the fundamentals as guidance for WFH. This is applicable for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) as well. 1) Adopting a strong password policy a.Eight or more characters b.Alpha numeric characters c.Mixture of upper- and lower-case characters d. Special characters 2) Making use of multi-factor authentication for identity management a. For key services, make use of non-SMS 2nd factor authentication b. VPN 3) Must have a computer usage policy, no matter how simple it is 4) Keeping your OS and software updated a. Enable auto-update where possible 5) Make use of SaaS services whenever possible (a cloud-first strategy is recommended) a. While it is a shared responsibility model for cloud, in a SaaS environment, the provider is responsible for most of them. Biometrics and contactless technologies
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