Businesses need to interface with AI to minimise identity, cybersecurity threats - Meyer

Organisations across Africa have increasingly become victims of cyber-attacks, leading to significant data compromises and financial losses. These attacks are becoming more frequent and sophisticated as hacker groups are now using artificial intelligence to carry them out. In this interview, Brendon Meyer, senior solutions engineer at Beyond Trust, shares his assessment of this growing challenge and the future of identity security in Africa. He also discussed the solutions his company is providing and what organisations and governments must do to minimise attacks, among other related issues. AMAKA ANAGOR-EWUZIE brings the excerpts:

How would you assess the state of cybersecurity across Africa with a special focus on identity security?

The cybersecurity landscape in Africa and Nigeria is evolving constantly. Every day there are new types of attacks from ransomware, phishing, and social engineering perspectives.

That said, from a regulatory front, it’s necessary to applaud how many African countries are essentially making use of regulation capabilities to address many cybersecurity issues to bolster their security posture. This unfortunate challenge is because infrastructure is still a bit of a challenge in the cybersecurity space.

From our engagement with customers across Nigeria, we notice that many lack the understanding of how they can use identity security best practices to bolster their security postures.

What does Beyond Trust do differently that separates it from other identity and access security solution companies across the globe?

Beyond Trust is a cybersecurity company. While many other companies provide similar security services, what we do differently when it comes to the security market is just the different approach we have to the market.

We have an identity-centric approach, meaning we focus on identity security and the measures we put in place to bolster organisations and personal identity security practices, make us unique when addressing cybersecurity threats in today’s modern landscape.

Beyond Trust is different because we put identity security first as a technology vendor. We have differentiated ourselves from an innovation standpoint because we constantly innovate, acquire new technology, and build out specific technology to help us bolster our identity security in conversation with our existing customers.

Additionally, one of the biggest differentiators specifically for Beyond Trust is that we might be a global company, but we have a local presence in countries within the African continent. We bolstered our capability and leveraged our partner ecosystem in each of these countries. Within Nigeria, we are pushing the conversation around identity security daily and leveraging the advanced skills the people of Nigeria can offer us.

The recent African Cyber-Threat Assessment Report puts Morocco, South Africa, and Nigeria as the most attacked by Trojans. What is the update, and what is the way forward?

The cybersecurity report in question underscores the need for organisations to have a strategic, multifaceted approach to cybersecurity, specifically in the African region.

If you could look at the sophistication of the Trojan horse attacks as a concept, we are seeing a massive increase in frequency and sophistication, and this underlines the fact that attacker and hacker groups are getting better funding, and skills, and are partnering with artificial intelligence to improve their capability when delivering these Trojan-based attacks.

They are also becoming smarter by targeting specific sectors and specific people, along with the efforts to mitigate this, which has become difficult for many organisations because they do not necessarily know this. They might go through security awareness training, but in many cases these advanced types of attacks become difficult.

As a specialist company, Beyond Trust is different because we have this identity-centric approach that allows us to see these attackers specifically through attacks based on malware and Trojan horse type of attacks. We also see these attackers providing ransomware as a service capability, and we equally see advanced persistent threat conversations specifically around cybersecurity where they constantly target organisations and, as a result, try and find these breaches in your environment.

We have observed based on data that attackers have not decreased their attacks; we have seen a significant increase in identity or privileged identity-based attacks as well as remote code execution.

From a specialist point of view, organisations must have an endpoint protection solution that rethinks the way malware can be deployed or executed. There are multiple ways you can address the conversation in the cybersecurity space.

Cybercriminals have continued to adopt more creative and sophisticated ways to attack unsuspecting organisations. How best can organisations stay ahead of this situation?

There are three-pronged approaches we recommend at a high level for most of our customers to help them prepare for any attack. First, we recommend that organisations and individuals need to be proactive.

Enterprises need to be proactive from a security posturing perspective by essentially identifying more of these threats earlier in the attack lifecycle. When organisations find these potential security risks faster, they suffer fewer breaches.

Another thing to note is that organisations have shifted from perimeter and endpoint-based attacks focus to an identity-based view. The shift from a traditional way of thinking when it comes to cybersecurity to an identity-based view has significantly bolstered and matured the security posture for these organisations when it comes to preventing or at least minimising attacks and risks associated with them.