Fixing Your Digital Insecurity — WED WEB CHAT

WED WEB CHAT, Harish Pillay, Kevin Reed

AS THE world struggles to cope with the disruptive nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, one group of predators is raising their game. And you’d best be alert to their approaches.

As work from home seems to be the norm these days, the network resilience offered by an office environment is being challenged by a hodgepodge of alternative options. Staff set up their own laptops and connect to programs they would otherwise not be able to access if they were ring-fenced by the office network security system.

Staying home and dealing with distracting children or aging parents could result in loss of focus, and maybe letting your guard down.

Meanwhile, the cybercriminals are lurking, ever ready to try and get into your system, to cripple you for a pretty bounty.

Are you working in a safe way? Have you thought of what the consequences could be if your system were hacked and you’re held to ransom by digital thugs?

This week’s WED WEB CHAT — Fixing Your Digital Insecurity is topical and offers expert advice for those trying to tread a safe path through uncertain terrain.

Our panellists are vastly experienced in the digital realm, and are happy to share their views in the Wednesday lunchtime discussion.

Kevin Reed, Acronis

Kevin Reed is the Chief Information Security Officer of Acronis, a cybersecurity company founded in Singapore in 2003 and incorporated in Switzerland in 2008. Its solutions are used by more than 5.5 million home users and all the Fortune 1000 companies and top-tier professional sports teams.

Kevin is in charge of developing cutting-edge security solutions and leads the company’s Cyber Protection Operation Centres worldwide.

In his two decades in cybersecurity, Kevin has protected the network of the 3rd largest bank in Europe by implementing cryptographic protection, he supervised the security strategy at Russian MNC, Yandex, where he was the CISO and Vice CIO, and he was also in charge of the IT infrastructure at online retailer Lazada.

Kevin led the Acronis team that recently released its Cyber Readiness Report 2020 which has findings relevant to the current situation where working remotely and videoconferencing seems to dominate our lives. The report surveyed 3,400 IT managers and remote workers from 17 countries and a range of industries.

Some of the survey findings:

31% of companies worldwide are attacked at least once a day. India had double that number of attacks.

39% of all companies encounter videoconferencing attacks.

Phishing ranks hightest among attacks, but only 2% of global companies look for a URL filtering feature.

92% of global companies had to adopt new technologies to work remotely.

88% of employees would like to continue working remotely to some extent.

You can read the full report here: https://zurl.co/ZIyG

Harish Pillay, Red Hat

Harish is currently the Global Head, Community Architecture and Leadership at multinational software company Red Hat. In his role, Harish works with the greater open source community to engage with government and C-level executives in the APAC region, on issues around around open standards, open data, open-source and how all of these can bring critical value to the respective entities.

Harish founded the Singapore Linux Users’ Group in 1993, and in 2005, he was inducted into the Council of Outstanding  Early Career Engineers by the College of Engineering,
Oregon State University. In 2009, he was conferred Fellow of the Singapore Computer Society.

In July 2016, he was elected into the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society for a 3-year term. And in 2017, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers, Singapore.

Register for this webinar on 16 Sep 2020 from 12:45-1:30pm using this link: https://zurl.co/b4do

You can watch previous WED WEB CHAT discussions on www.storm-asia.com.


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