Whether or not it’s on the average person’s radar, cyberattacks are climbing.
“The amount of attacks that we see coming in from those countries has significantly increased over the last two years—especially since the Ukrainian War. It’s just not publicly available,” Nayaki Nayyar, chief product officer of Ivanti, said at a roundtable at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference this week. There are a host of attacks happening that aren’t making the news, she said, but they’re on the rise.
Dorit Dor, chief product officer of Check Point Software Technologies, emphasized at the roundtable that it’s not just the Ukrainian war that has led to an uptick in attacks. COVID and burgeoning blockchain technology have played their own role. Dor pointed out that, in this case, “cyber war did not replace the real war.”
Fortunately for companies—they’ve been preparing for this moment—cybersecurity continues to be a priority within the C-suite, even if it isn’t as immediately pressing as rising inflation or supply chain bottlenecks causing headaches across the largest corporations in the U.S. Theta Lake, a compliance technology company for collaboration tools, which works with several Fortune 100 financial services companies, has seen many of its customers invest rather heavily in cybersecurity in recent years. “I think there’s a lot of readiness and preparation that’s gone into it for at least six years or so,” Devin Redmond, the startup’s chief executive, said.
Part of the reason is that cybersecurity is no longer considered just an “information” problem. “This is not just a CIO or CISO problem anymore: This is a board issue,” Nayyar said. “Pretty much every board is required now to be able to declare if there is any significant breach within four days of that happening—so this is a pretty big topic across every public company, across every vote, every organization.”
It’s one of the reasons that cyber companies are poised to survive a recession.
Dor mentioned that she had interviewed Cisco recently, and asked if anything good was coming out of this new environment we have entered.
“He said I have increased the budget for all of you,” she said.
