Elias Matta, MD, MEA at CrowdStrike

This year’s COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has set a new reality for businesses, where they were suddenly forced to shift their workforces to a `work from home’ (WFH) model.

The majority of existing on-premise cyber security investments were not designed to support this type of operating model, which presented attackers with a much wider attack surface.

This is why we are seeing a proliferation of cyber attacks targeting businesses of all sizes, says Elias Matta, MD, MEA at CrowdStrike, a cyber security company based in California, and diamond sponsor of ITWeb’s Security Summit 2020.

“Data breaches and ransomware attacks have become today’s everyday news,” he adds.

Speaking of what he sees as being the biggest security trend in 2020, Matta says there is an ongoing paradigm shift in cyber security strategies happening this year, where CISOs and security leaders are prioritising budget spending on cloud technologies that can protect a user anywhere, anytime.

“So we are noticing reduced spending on firewalls, sandboxes, and suchlike, and a much bigger focus on endpoint security, endpoint detection and response, email and identity security.”

In terms of how Matta sees the threat landscape evolving over the next five years, he says while it’s difficult to predict the coming five years in a threat landscape that shifts on a daily basis, he believes that the new world situation has forced an accelerated, and often poorly planned, digital transformation.

“Cyber threats are going to grow in potency and sophistication, expanding the attack surface to include cloud workloads, mobile phones, and remote users. We, as the cyber security industry, need to be prepared, vigilant, and quick to adapt,” he adds.

Offering a piece of advice to organisations, Matta says: “I would advise cyber security leaders to never underestimate the threat actors and adversaries that targeting them, regardless of how small the organisation might be, and to be prepared to redeploy their budgets towards solutions that are fitted for the cloud workload and WFH era.”

During the Summit, which will be held as a virtual event from 25 to 28 August this year, CrowdStrike’s Roland Daccache, team leader – Sales Engineering META, will be presenting on ‘Stopping ‘living off the land’ attackers in their tracks’.

In addition, the company’s Yassin Watlal, regional system engineering manager, META, will be discussing ‘Adapting effective cyber security strategies in today’s age of radical digital transformation’.