Businesses should adopt multi-layered cybersecurity solutions

In conversation with Security MEA, Majd Sinan, Country Manager for UAE, Trend Micro shares his thought about the evolving threat landscape in context with the company’s annual cybersecurity report and how is multi-layered cybersecurity a better bet in handling cyberthreats.

How would you evaluate the cybersecurity landscape in the region, and how is it different from the rest of the world?
The region has been incredibly resilient through the pandemic and the accelerated digital transformation. However, as the world around us is rapidly changes, organizations in both the public and private sectors have not been complacent with their digital activities. They understand the need for better, robust, and multi-layered cybersecurity solutions that can protect their operations in the hybrid world and prepare them for future challenges in the digital sphere.

Trend Micro’s collaborations and partnerships with the government and enterprises in UAE, to strengthen the Cyber Threat Intelligence and response, and the most recent opening of Trend Micro’s Middle East and Africa headquarters in Riyadh, have established a more resilient security stance in the region.

According to you, what are the new frontiers of cybersecurity?
Today’s digital world has witnessed many benefits of cybersecurity and easier ways to connect and increase productivity. Enterprises are still in the process of digitizing, digitalizing, and migrating to the cloud. The need for cybersecurity is more apparent now than ever as organizations and individuals are relying on innovations that make their lives easier in the new hybrid environment.

In current scenario, hybrid work and learning have become a prominent fixture in almost every organization and household across the region. These remotely located access points can create complexities within a network, which must be protected with the most highly sophisticated solutions and industry-leading strategies in cybersecurity.

Looking forward, organizations and individual users will also need to be educated on new technologies regarding the cloud. The cloud has become the new destination for transferring, operating, and saving digital assets. Each of those processes will require industry-leading solutions to protect them.

In your latest report, you have mentioned that Trend Micro was able to block and detect 104 million threats last year in UAE, but the breakup mentioned in the same sums up the total threats to 94 million. What are those 10 million threats that were stopped by Trend Micro solutions, but stayed unaccounted in this total?
There are certain categories included in the sum of 104 million threats, such as URL hosted threats, botnet victims, botnet servers, etc. The categories that have been mentioned are to highlight or emphasize the more prevalent cyberattacks in the current threat landscape, making it easier for people to understand the overarching threats enterprises have to face on a daily basis. The following are the unmentioned types of attacks included in the sum of up to over 104 million threats – URL hosted attacks, Botnet victim attacks, Botnet server attacks, Banking, Mobile Unique Queries, Mobile Unique Malicious attacks, Mobile Non-Unique Queries, Mobile Non-Unique Malicious attacks, SHN-Router attacks, and SHN-IP attacks.

What is the major source of these threats? Are these home-grown threats or these threats are borne outside UAE?
The evolving threat landscape is vast and unpredictable. Bad actors are faceless and do not operate from an identifiable single location, while they recruit newer groups to add to their criminal activities. As highlighted in the Toward a New Momentum: Trend Micro Security Predictions for 2022 report, the modern-day threat landscape revolves around cloud threats, ransomware, IoT threats, and supply chain attacks. Additionally, there are commodity attacks, where malicious actors prey on SMBs (small to medium-size businesses), taking advantage of a smaller enterprise’s limited resources. Vulnerability exploits are also emerging, which sees bad actors repurpose older vulnerabilities and exploit new ones within a matter of days, if not hours.

As these threats are becoming more targeted and more lethal in nature, what role can government play in curtailing these threats?
Government entities have already taken the necessary steps to protect their citizens’ digital experiences by collaborating with cybersecurity vendors and introducing initiatives that push the movement of cybersecurity awareness forward. Cutting-edge security tools are only a part of a larger strategy protecting digital environments across the region. Organizations must adopt better cybersecurity training and skilling to strengthen their growth strategies, and continuously enhance the security approach to counter modern-day threats.

What is the best way of handling these threats?
Decision-makers will have to adopt security innovations that are easy to use and deploy. Alongside robust single platforms that cover all angles of attacks, organizations must conduct regular cybersecurity awareness training for employees, and adopt the Zero Trust approach, proactively tackling looming threats in and out of the company’s network.

Zero Trust is an architectural approach and goal for network security that assumes that every transaction, entity, and identity is untrusted until trust is established and maintained over time. Organizations must rely on such solutions as traditional cybersecurity practices may not be effective against today’s sophisticated attackers.

Trend Micro has been propagating multi-layered security, how does that work, and how effective it is if compared to other solutions in the market?
We constantly strive to enhance the digital experience with cutting-edge solutions, actionable insights, and best practices. From small to medium size businesses to industry-leading enterprises, we aim to provide organizations with a competitive edge in reaching greater milestones throughout their digital journeys.

Trend Micro’s multi-layered approach to cybersecurity threats protects enterprises on various fronts and is prioritized for the best risk mitigation. Through the virtue of XDR, we protect organizations across cloud, servers, networks, endpoints and more. we empower security teams to detect, investigate, prioritize, and respond to threats quicker than ever, across more security layers than traditional security solutions.

Trend Micro One is an unified multi-layered platform that combines the capabilities of cutting edge solutions like Trend Micro Cloud One, Trend Micro Vision One, Trend Micro WorkForce One, Trend Micro Service One, and Trend Micro Network One in a single platform that allows organizations to better understand and lower cyber risks.

With Trend Micro One, it is safe to say that we’ve brought a different meaning to the term ‘the power of one.’ There has never been a single multilayered platform that will bring greater impact on securing entire digital infrastructures and accelerating the growth of enterprises. Organizations now have a multilayered unified approach in a security console that can overcome modern day threat actors and their stealthy and sophisticated approach.

How easy is it for the enterprises to adopt the multi-layered security solutions, and how can they measure the difference in performance to traditional security solutions in the market?
With the threat landscape changing rapidly, it is important that businesses adopt multi-layered cybersecurity solutions that are easy to deploy and provide protection across all stages of the enterprise operations.

Trend Micro provides enterprises with best-in-class multi-layered security solutions that through the power of XDR provide agility to the security teams and the ability to streamline compliance.

With XDR at the core, Trend Micro solutions provide centralized visibility, allowing businesses to detect and prevent intrusions while effectively analysing and responding to threats across endpoints, servers, cloud, messaging, networks, mobile, and more within a short span of time.

Based on Gartner Peer Insights, integration, development, service, support, and product capabilities from Trend Micro have positively impacted nearly 93% of customers that continue to rely on its cutting-edge and multi-layered cybersecurity innovations.