Cisco Warns Banks, Others of Increased Cyber- Attacks

The increasing threats of cybercrime menace may impact more on the activities of banks and other financial institutions, oil and gas and other sectors of the economy, except urgent measures are implemented.

Speaking at the presentation of the 2014 Cisco Mobility Report in Lagos, Dare Ogunlade, Cisco’s Country Manager, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ghana, noted that cyber insecurity was posing great danger to individuals, businesses and governments across the globe, growing at an average 14 per cent on a year-on-year basis.

Ogunlade said while agriculture, mining, electronics and pharmaceutical industries characterised the list vulnerable sectors on a global scale, the Nigerian case is a peculiar one where banks, operators in the oil and gas industry and government appear to be the most vulnerable.

According to him, the advent of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), a practice where workers bring their personal PC and other devices to an office environment and connect same to an organisation’s network to work, has made cyber-attacks to increase astronomically.

“Hackers work in collaborations with each other’s to actually launch attacks on organisations and the trend is becoming a lot more difficult because organisations have not really come to terms with the complexity of cyber-attacks,” he said.

He noted that 91 per cent of Java-based applications were compromised because it is the most popular language of the Internet with open source capability. While lamenting lack of security experts, who can identify threats and nip them in the bud in most organisations, Ogunlade described security solution as an end–to-end practice, which organisations must deploy but decried that it currently suffers inadequate skills.

“Organizations across Africa must realize that it is no longer if they will targeted by cyber-attacks, but rather when. Chief Information Security Officers face growing pressure to protect terabytes of data on an increasingly porous network, manage information safely especially on the cloud, and evaluate the risks of working with third-party vendors for specialized solutions – all in the wake of shrinking budgets and leaner IT teams”, he stressed.

Explaining the severity and complexity of cyber-attacks, Adeola Kukoyi, a Cisco security technology expert, said that 60 per cent of data is stolen in hours, 54 per cent of breaches remain undiscovered, while 100 per cent of companies are connected to domains that host malicious files or services. Kukoyi, thus, unveiled a 10-point checklist provided in the Cisco’s security report to help organisations guide against cyber-attacks.

He listed that the checklist to include assessment of the totality of companies’ networks; re-evaluation of acceptable use policy and business code of conduct; determination of what data must be protected; knowing where the company’s data is and understanding how and if is being secured.

Kukoyi advised firms to among other things,”assess your company user education practices, use egress monitoring (monitor what is being sent out of your organisation and by whom and to where), prepare from the inevitability of BYOD, create an incident response plan, implement security measures to help compensate for lack of control over social networks, and monitor the dynamic risk landscape as well as
Cisco Warns Banks, Others of Increased Cyber- Attacks

The increasing threats of cybercrime menace may impact more on the activities of banks and other financial institutions, oil and gas and other sectors of the economy, except urgent measures are implemented.

Speaking at the presentation of the 2014 Cisco Mobility Report in Lagos, Dare Ogunlade, Cisco’s Country Manager, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ghana, noted that cyber insecurity was posing great danger to individuals, businesses and governments across the globe, growing at an average 14 per cent on a year-on-year basis.

Ogunlade said while agriculture, mining, electronics and pharmaceutical industries characterised the list vulnerable sectors on a global scale, the Nigerian case is a peculiar one where banks, operators in the oil and gas industry and government appear to be the most vulnerable.

According to him, the advent of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), a practice where workers bring their personal PC and other devices to an office environment and connect same to an organisation’s network to work, has made cyber-attacks to increase astronomically.

“Hackers work in collaborations with each other’s to actually launch attacks on organisations and the trend is becoming a lot more difficult because organisations have not really come to terms with the complexity of cyber-attacks,” he said.

He noted that 91 per cent of Java-based applications were compromised because it is the most popular language of the Internet with open source capability. While lamenting lack of security experts, who can identify threats and nip them in the bud in most organisations, Ogunlade described security solution as an end–to-end practice, which organisations must deploy but decried that it currently suffers inadequate skills.

“Organizations across Africa must realize that it is no longer if they will targeted by cyber-attacks, but rather when. Chief Information Security Officers face growing pressure to protect terabytes of data on an increasingly porous network, manage information safely especially on the cloud, and evaluate the risks of working with third-party vendors for specialized solutions – all in the wake of shrinking budgets and leaner IT teams”, he stressed.

Explaining the severity and complexity of cyber-attacks, Adeola Kukoyi, a Cisco security technology expert, said that 60 per cent of data is stolen in hours, 54 per cent of breaches remain undiscovered, while 100 per cent of companies are connected to domains that host malicious files or services. Kukoyi, thus, unveiled a 10-point checklist provided in the Cisco’s security report to help organisations guide against cyber-attacks.

He listed that the checklist to include assessment of the totality of companies’ networks; re-evaluation of acceptable use policy and business code of conduct; determination of what data must be protected; knowing where the company’s data is and understanding how and if is being secured.

Kukoyi advised firms to among other things,”assess your company user education practices, use egress monitoring (monitor what is being sent out of your organisation and by whom and to where), prepare from the inevitability of BYOD, create an incident response plan, implement security measures to help compensate for lack of control over social networks, and monitor the dynamic risk landscape as well as keep users and employees informed.”

 keep users and employees informed.”