South Africa is in a state of cyber civilisation, impacted by tough economic conditions and the rising cost of living, which threat actors are more than ready to exploit.
As embattled citizens try to keep afloat, they become more susceptible to social engineering and phishing scams, says Armand Kruger, head of cyber security at NEC XON, in an interview with ITWeb TV.
Kruger believes SA urgently needs a mindset change when it comes to traditional cyber security.
“In cyber security, typically we had prevention, detection, response and recovery. Those were your main pillars of classifying cyber security verticals. Now we’ve got anticipation, prevention, detection, response and recovery.”
This is in-depth defence, adds Kruger. “There is natural synergy between these pillars.”
He notes that the goal with anticipation is to eliminate the opportunity for a threat actor to execute an attack.
“If he doesn’t have an opportunity, he can’t do it. Even if there’s a vulnerability, how are you going to exploit it? If you remove oxygen from a fire, the fire dies – even though the fire is still there. This is what we are trying to do from an anticipation perspective.
“We want to prevent the risk before it happens, and should it happen, it is contained…it’s containable and the blast radius is minimum, which means your risk is minimum, which means your compliance breaches are minimum, which means you most likely don’t have to go to the regulator and follow that process, feature in the news and suffer reputational damage or financial loss.”
Kruger acknowledges it may take some time for the South African market to grasp the dynamics of an anticipation pillar, but the intention is to push this as hard as possible to mitigate risk and thwart threat actors.
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