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00:09 Welcome back right here on The Exchange, where your business is our business.
00:14 I'm Rico Hizon.
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00:22 Tens of millions could be lost by companies from a single data breach.
00:26 And so most businesses now opt to get help in beefing up their cybersecurity apparatuses.
00:32 Let's now have an exchange with IBM Securities' Chris Hawkins, joining us now from Brisbane, Australia.
00:38 Chris, great to have you with us.
00:39 How important is it for enterprises to strengthen their cybersecurity initiatives and crack down on online attacks?
00:48 Well, I think it's critical, and that's for a number of reasons.
00:52 First of all, the attackers continue to use advanced technology against us.
00:56 We're continuing to expand our IT landscape across cloud environments, et cetera.
01:02 And you really do need to keep looking at your cybersecurity deployment technology,
01:08 the people you're using, the efficiency of those systems,
01:11 and making sure that they're really up to date with the modern threats that we face because of this new world.
01:18 And Chris, we just heard from our previous guests on Filipino cybersecurity procedures.
01:23 How does the Philippines fare compared to the rest of the Asia Pacific in terms of online safety?
01:32 Well, I think there's a few trends that I wanted to talk about with you today.
01:36 First of all, the cost of breaches continue to go up, and that's fairly common across every single market.
01:42 But the one area that's really making a dent in the cost of a data breach,
01:46 and really what we're trying to do is to reduce the overall time it takes for us to detect, respond, and recover from breaches.
01:53 And the use of advanced technology such as AI and then automation as well is showing some real signs of reducing that overall time and therefore the cost.
02:03 Organizations in the Philippines, in ASEAN, are starting to take up this technology with the help of advanced technology vendors like IBM.
02:12 And that is resulting in reductions of around a third, in some cases, the overall cost of a breach and reducing the number of days by 100,
02:21 almost 100 in ASEAN around the time it takes to detect and respond.
02:28 So if you look at that against the regulatory landscape, there's good policy being created around protection of critical infrastructure.
02:38 This is mirroring those activities that are happening in other regions.
02:42 Some regions are more advanced than others.
02:44 But also when you look at that SIM registration act that you've passed, you know,
02:50 it has to be a continuous improvement not just in the technology adoption and programs,
02:55 but also in that regulatory landscape and the maturing of that as well.
03:00 But what are the common mistakes, Chris, committed by organizations that expose them further to cyber criminality?
03:10 Well, I think there's a number of lessons that we all can learn, individuals, government and business.
03:16 If you look at some of the data, a good percentage of the cyber breaches that happen occur via stolen or phished credentials
03:26 and implementation of things like second factor authentication can simply remove that threat entirely.
03:32 So that kind of narrows down the attack temptations that an attack would use to go after you.
03:39 I think the second part is that as IT landscape expands, so too does the IT that's exposed to the Internet.
03:46 And therefore there's what's known as an attack surface that grows.
03:50 Continuously monitoring that attack surface and looking at it from the attacker's perspective as to what house, what door,
03:58 what window leads to the loot is something that's a modern practice that many organizations are starting to embark on.
04:05 So understanding that attack landscape and then intermixing that, of course, with patching as well.
04:11 You won't 100% get to fully patched and not vulnerable systems,
04:16 but you need to take a risk methodology across all of that and make sure that those high impact,
04:22 in a lot of cases, low cost visibility elements are used to lower that risk as an end to end advance of the cybersecurity strategy.
04:35 My question for you now is, what is your advice for firms that want to beef up their cybersecurity apparatuses
04:41 but are constrained in resources like finances and manpower?
04:47 Well, I've talked a lot about manpower or skills as being solved by modern technology advances.
04:55 And if you look at this cost for data breach report, it does show that analytics, AI and automation is having a dramatic effect on that overall cost.
05:05 And that translates to the people side of things, because you can get those people being more proactive.
05:12 You can give them more meaningful work by making sure that you continually look at your budget,
05:19 what technology that you're being used, make sure that it's rationalized and modernized so that you remove some of your financial impediments that exist in traditional security programs.
05:33 We know that as the threat landscape has increased, many of the systems that organizations use are no longer able to stretch to those new ways of working.
05:45 And I think there's enormous opportunity in what we're seeing in organizations is a rationalization and then the use of analytics to reduce the overall time it takes to detect and respond,
05:55 the cost of those programs and also better use of the people that they've got.
06:00 So AI is one of those tools, those assists that you can use to make people more productive.
06:07 And as you get more people, you're going to be able to scale and expand more quickly and then reduce that overall cost over time.
06:15 Thank you so much for this business security, cybersecurity exchange, IBM Securities.
06:21 Chris Hawkins joining us from Brisbane, Australia.
06:24 And before we go here, words from cybersecurity strategist, Matthew Rosenquist.
06:29 Cybersecurity may be fought with technology, but it is people who triumph.
06:34 We must invest in the future generations of professionals who will carry on the fight.
06:40 And this is the exchange who makes sense of the facts and the figures and the ups and downs of the business cycle because your business is our business.
06:47 I'm Rico Gizon. Thanks for watching CNN Philippines.
06:50 News you can use. News you can trust.
06:53 (Music)
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