CRN roundtable: The changing shape of cyber security

Aaron  No, probably not. There’s a new service that can actually teach you what the value of your Gmail account is, for end users and consumers. I don’t believe I know about a particular service certainly online that does that for SMBs and mid-market.  That would certainly be helpful.  But I think that started to come about for consumers, because usually people have a reasonably complex password, and then usually they use that password on a number of different services. The service actually scans the contents of your Gmail account, and through that it knows what automatic emails you’re getting for a number of different services. Each of those is then quantified in terms of how much money a party could actually make out of that, and it gives you a value of  what your Gmail account is worth. An approach to be able to quantify for a client the types and the value of their data is key.

Craig  And we’ve got to figure out a way to educate SMBs on this. As we move to the cloud think of the life cycle management of the data, or passwords, or access. It’s really easy to get stuff on the cloud.  We thought about how we secure it, and we talked about encryption on the cloud, but have we also thought about how we get it off the cloud if and when we want to do that, and that is an area where I think we really have to create some really simple solutions for SMBs  and our channel partners.

Sanjay  Great point. People are looking at their first cloud relationships, and I think we need to look and see what happens when they divorce my cloud provider. The next one is prettier and I want to move to them faster. Encryption can certainly be a very key precaution in that

Peter  Back to the original question, I think a lot of SMBs know that. They’ve got intellectual property. What SMBs don’t know is that intellectual property is under threat from cyber threats, and that’s probably the biggest perception challenge. Sure, they have key people they trust with it in their organisations, but they just don’t understand about the cyber threat itself.

Aviv  We did these analyst reports on our customers, where even in small organisations, or specialist small organisations, they tend to let data slip a little bit easier. It’s mostly about awareness. That’s definitely amplified by the use of devices, mobile devices especially, and I’ve seen a situation where a key executive actually accidentally leaked sensitive information just because they forwarded an email from their iPhone, not realising that there were actually attachments connected.

The devices that we have today, actually make it easie5r for everybody to leak data.

A colleague in Canada recently used an iPhone application to book flights through his airline of choice.  Luckily device on his network actually detected a data leakage when he was trying to book a flight. 

It turned out that that particular iPhone application did not encrypt the data, and would have sent his private card details, passport number, everything you could imagine you would have when you’re booking a flight, and this is really significant issue.  How much do we know about how secure all those apps that we use are ---- especially the ones that you sign in with.  How do we know if they’re encrypted or not?  We don’t really know.  As security experts it’s hard for us to know let alone if you’re not in security and you don’t’ understand how this magic actually happens.

End of Part 1