Africa CISO Summit: Emerging Cyber Security Trends

“Insider threats are the most lethal threats to any business and is what most CISOs are constantly thinking of,” is the biggest takeaway from Richard Muthua’s presentation at the Africa CISO Summit.

Muthua, the Executive Head – Cloud and Security at Liquid C2, spoke on the emerging cyber security trends during his keynote presentation at the event. With cyber security becoming more crucial during this digital transformation age, the trends in this space also keep on changing.

In his presentation, Muthua shared the insights of a report done by Liquid C2 that surveyed CISOs in different parts of the continent. Having done the survey in Kenya, South Africa, and Zambia, the report found that many companies are investing more into cyber security and looking at it as a business investment rather than when security was seen as a cost centre.

Technology has been also changing more rapidly, widening the attack surface for these hackers. Muthua further talked about how hackers are using new technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to carry out attacks and so CISOs need to also look into these new technologies to help protect their organizations.

“More decision makers are fearing that cyber security will bring down their businesses if they don’t invest in it enough. I would say that it’s good thing because cyber security is no longer a CISO conversation or a CIO conversation, it is becoming a business conversation. This is why more companies are now investing in cyber security,” Muthua noted, in his keynote presentation.

He went ahead to give the biggest threats that CISOs are looking at when protecting their organizations. According to Muthua, with agreements from a couple of CISOs in the audience, insider threats is the biggest threat to any CISO right now.

Muthua went ahead to list other big threats to the CISO right now including: supply chain attacks (DDOS and DNS), phishing attacks, mobile malware, IOT Botnets, Crypto jacking, application portal exploitation, AI based threat evasion, and social engineering.

With all these threats to any organization, what then can a CISO do to make sure the organization is protected.

Muthua gave few important aspects that a CISO needs to focus on to ensure the organization is safe and ready to react in case of a breach. In this age and time it is important for a CISO to;

• Think of security as a core business strategy
• Focus on identification, visibility, and proactive monitoring of cyber assets,
• Guard against complacency and have the business to invest in cyber security as a priority
• Be proactive in thinking and planning of defence strategies
• Embrace zero trust strategies
• Collaborate with peers about attacks and breaches
• Keep testing their defense systems frequently