A.I. drives cyber

One-upmanship Cybersecurity firms and cybercriminals are in perpetual contest with the digital landscape as their battleground.

Nasdaq-listed Fortinet has warned that cyberattacks on private enterprises and government organizations around the world are getting more brazen, widespread and sophisticated with the cybercriminals’ use of artificial intelligence (AI).

A paper by Aamir Lahkan has revealed that as organizations undertake digital transformation, they become more and more vulnerable to cyberattacks — an issue which Fortinet wants to train the spotlight on in a press briefing today at Bonifacio Global City.

In an exclusive to the Daily Tribune, the head of the information technology (IT) division of a Philippine conglomerate has revealed that a ransomware attack recently crippled their website used as a platform to transact business with their customers.

“Those behind the ransomware locked the site and promised to provide us the decryption key once ransom was paid. We did not pay as that would have made us a more tempting target for further attacks,” the executive said.

“It was good we back-up everything and so after a few days we were back online but not without receiving numerous complaints from customers. I’ve needled the company top brass about the need for tighter security, but it took this ransomware attack to jolt them to their senses,” he added.

Adjudged as the Most Innovative Newspaper for 2018 by the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Daily Tribune itself had been the target of a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack following its hyper-fast rise to be among the top dailies in the Philippines since management change a year ago.

The paper’s IT head Wrenn Rouvel Sanchez said that his team’s investigation showed bots repetitively coupling themselves to the paper’s website to clog its network and deprive access to flesh-and-blood Daily Tribune readers.

“We do not want to point fingers but DDOS attacks usually are launched by competitors, maybe by a particular outfit which has been mimicking everything the Tribune does, including coming up with online shows,” Sanchez said.

In pushing cybersecurity threats at the forefront of the IT consciousness in the Philippines, Fortinet cited the value of investing in intelligent and “seamless protection across the expanding attack surface.”

It said its Fortinet Security Fabric architecture addresses the “most critical security challenges, whether in networked, application, cloud or mobile environments,” with its client base of 375,000 customers.

“As the modern threat landscape continues to expand, adding artificial intelligence to a security strategy has become paramount to establishing and maintaining an effective security posture,” Lahkan wrote.

“Given the speed and complexity of modern cyberthreats and the current cybersecurity skills shortage, network security teams need the assistance of machine learning and other AI-based capabilities in order to detect, secure and mitigate modern attacks,” he pointed out.

Lahkan pointed out that cyber thugs have already started leveraging automated and scripted “techniques in an effort to drastically increase the speed and scale of their attacks. Thanks to these advanced capabilities, we’ve seen the volume of exploits skyrocket, rising 240 percent from Q1 to Q2 2018.”