The world faces an unprecedented level of cybersecurity threats, making it crucial for all organisations involved in cyberdefence to work together to thwart the attacks, says Jeetu Patel, executive vice-president at global networking leader Cisco.
Speaking at the Cisco Live 2024 conference and expo in Las Vegas this week, where AI and cybersecurity were dominant themes, he pointed out the real-world consequences of cyberbreaches, from hospitals to financial services and power grids.
“Security is fundamentally a data game. How many companies in the world are good at data? Very few. Every company is at a different level of maturity for a multitude of reasons, because of which they’re not sophisticated enough to know what you need to do to prevent a breach from happening.
“But what you need to do is make sure that you detect, respond and remediate a breach that’s in progress, and if you only do one and not the other, that doesn’t work.”
According to a study by Cybersecurity Ventures — the world’s leading researcher covering the global cybereconomy and a trusted source for cybersecurity facts, figures and statistics — a cyberattack took place every 39 seconds in 2023, translating into over 2,200 cases per day. This contrasts with the data for 2022, when an incident occurred every 44 seconds. The top reported cyberattacks in 2023 were malware, ransomware and phishing attacks. Ports run by Transnet have previously suffered multiple cyberattacks. In 2022 Eskom fell victim to a ransomware attack.
Patel said that no matter how reliable a network was from a structural point of view, it would not matter if it was not secure. “To help make the world a safer place, we need to reimagine security.”
Cisco Live came less than three months after the company completed its $28bn (R527bn) acquisition of security and analytics software company Splunk. The result was that, unlike most tech conferences of the past year, it was no longer all about AI.
Patel and Gary Steele, the CEO of Splunk who presided over its sale to Cisco and is now head of “go-to-market” at Cisco, stressed the importance of collaboration among tech companies in the fight against cyberattacks.
Steele described collaborative efforts in the Ukrainian war, where industry players provided support to underfunded Ukrainian organisations facing cyber-threats from Russia. “When the Ukrainian war broke out, there was a set of industry players that got together just because they thought that was the right thing to do and helped facilitate with technology to underfunded Ukrainian critical infrastructure organisations that needed help.”
The kind of attacks that saw hackers breach the systems of South African government entities, such as its ports and the department of justice & constitutional development, could be prevented by “basic cyber-hygiene”, said Steele. “The biggest mistakes we see are people not doing the basics well. Are you patched? Do you have multi-factor authentication? All the normal security controls — are they in place and executed 100% across the entire digital footprint?” He said there had been action to get together global government organisations and industry to collaborate in the fight.
“There’s been active work to do similar things with other government organisations around the world where industry and governments come together. The US is a little further along in having a defined organisation and a structure that we can all engage in.”
“We look more broadly around the globe, at how, as an industry, we can play a more active role in cyberprotection ... does there need to be more [co-operation]? Yes. Does it need to cross more government boundaries? Yes.”
Steele became a key player in such industry co-operation in 2023 when he was elected co-chair of Aspen Digital’s US Cybersecurity Group, a cross-sector, public-private forum that accelerates the pace of cybersecurity preparedness to drive greater cyber-resilience around the world.
“Aspen brings together industry players, as well as many US government organisations in an effort to focus on a set of critical cyber-problems,” he said, acknowledging the tension between co-operation and profitability. “The challenge is when does collaboration impact profitability? That’s always the trick. There has been success where the government is facilitating, and people aren’t giving up proprietary information to support it. We’re all collaborating in a way that is mutually beneficial to all.
The challenge lies in achieving co-operation without giving away business secrets in a highly strategic area
“The challenge lies in achieving that co-operation without giving away business secrets in a highly strategic area. If you look across the industry, where new kinds of threats come in that are incredibly complicated, typically competitors will still collaborate, and they’ll look at things collectively to figure out what the impact will be.”
Patel said: “When we approached Microsoft with this idea [of collaboration], they were all in, and I appreciate that so much because the importance of this is so profound to society and to the safety of humanity. In order for me to win, you don’t have to lose. You can win and I can win. And when that happens, it’s better.
“They have a lot of telemetry on the operating system, and we have a lot of telemetry on the network. Those are fundamentally complementary. It is important to start from the customer’s needs and work backwards, ensuring that vendors co-operate to deliver the best possible outcomes.”
Steele said top leadership needed to prioritise cybersecurity due to the increasing sophistication of threats.
During Cisco Live, new capabilities were announced across the Cisco Security Cloud to create a “unified, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform” that the company said tips the balance of power in favour of the defenders.
“Cisco Security has delivered more innovation in the past year than in the previous decade combined, and this year will be multiples of what we delivered last year,” said Patel, announcing new sources of Cisco telemetry as a result of integration with Splunk. “Bolstered by our partnerships with other titans in the industry, strategic acquisitions and a commitment to an open ecosystem, we are reimagining security for our customers.”
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