The remote-working revolution has been a windfall for hackers, who have found a vast audience of working people suddenly cast adrift from their corporate networks, working on largely unprotected computers.
Sure, we all have anti-virus software installed, or should have, but the modern cybercriminal has moved on. Conning us into exposing passwords, or getting us to click on links that suddenly dispense permission for outsiders to delve deep into corporate data, are just some personalised examples of the new way of the hacker.
Then there are the brute force attacks that involve hijacking thousands of computers to launch co-ordinated attacks on specific sites and services. Last month, the New Zealand stock exchange was brought down by just such an attack — called distributed denial-of-service — in what was regarded as a practice run to attack other exchanges.
How can individuals and organisations alike be so vulnerable in a time of pervasive cybersecurity? Simply, hyper-connected individuals, who can access the internet from everywhere, are the best friends of these crooks, as they are constantly looking for the next connectivity trick — and the hackers are constantly lying in wait to exploit those connections.
Even companies that have cybersecurity systems in place are often not giving these individuals the protection they need from new criminal methods, because they are usually responding to new kinds of breaches in an ad hoc fashion. Think of it as small, manual responses to large-scale, automated attacks. The targets stand no chance. But there is an answer. It’s called “intrinsic security”.
The term was popularised by cloud architecture leader VMware, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies, two years ago, but is now coming into its own.
“In this period, surely the greatest migration in the workforce in human history occurred in just a few weeks,” said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger during this week’s VMworld, an annual conference held virtually for the first time. It attracted 150,000 delegates online, compared to about 10,000 who usually make the trip to Barcelona every year.
During this time, he said, “intrinsic security has been a bad day for the cybercriminal”.
Intrinsic security is not so much a specific technology as a vision of the way any IT organisation has to put cybersecurity at the core of its solutions. But, in effect, all businesses have to become cybersecurity businesses. Intrinsic security makes security more automated, proactive and pervasive across an entire distributed enterprise. This reduces the risk to critical applications, sensitive data, and users “by shrinking the attack surface across clouds, data centres, end-users, and the enterprise edge”.
As the attacks become more complex, however, the key lies in harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse the threats as well deploy solutions, on the fly, that are specifically crafted for specific situations — but without manual intervention.
As a result, said Gelsinger, he was particularly excited about VMware’s new partnership with Nvidia, best known as a maker of computer graphics processors for video gaming. Most recently, Nvidia’s share price went through the ceiling as it became clear that its chips were also ideal for AI.
“The coming together of their leadership position in AI, combined with VMware’s leadership position in the enterprise, says we're going to democratise AI — maybe the most powerful of the technology superpowers today,” said Gelsinger.
“It’s this idea that AI can now interrogate and inspect large sets of data, and software can now write software. We’re going to make that broadly available in the enterprise. We want all enterprises to be able to take advantage of the power of AI and the cloud, from the core to the edge of the network.”
• Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za.
