Eureka and Cloudflare share insights on emerging trends of cyber security landscape

By Shannon Jayawardena

A seminar on the emerging trends in the cyber security landscape organised by Eureka and Cloudflare recently shared insights and information as to how businesses could handle such attacks with the right solutions.  

Cloudflare Asia Pacific Managing Director Aliza Knox said: “10% internet requests everyday go through Cloudflare and it speeds up each request by 200%. Effective performance and security depend on the network’s size and stability.”

She stressed on the fact that there are several factors that increase exposure to cyber security risks such as stronger and more sophisticated attackers, greater scrutiny by government and media around data, privacy and security and greater attack surface areas from more public APIs, moving to Cloud which shows that it really is a more serious issue.

“Cyber security threats faced by millions of customers including those at Cloudflare include DDoS attacks which degrade availability and performance of applications, websites and APIS, data theft attempts and malicious bots,” noted Knox.

She also emphasised on the fact that it used to be that attacks were smaller. Attacks in 2007 affected a mere 24 Gbps and now the biggest attack in 2018 affected 1.7 Tbps. That is why there is a strong need to build larger networks to prevent such attacks. It is much easier to be an attacker than to get attacked, said Knox. 

When it comes to cyber security, the risks and things that one should be aware of are areas such as compromisation of sensitive data, DNS spoofing, data snooping, brute forces and malicious payloads.

“There are multiple attackers these days and you have to be looking into vendors who provide multiple defence. This is a complicated problem and you should leverage on what someone else has built. Customers want ease of use, speed in terms of improving performance through integrated traffic acceleration and scale, resilience and intelligence to combat the biggest and newest attacks,” Knox stressed.

In turn these threats have huge impacts on the businesses that are affected. Knox stated that these threats affect through degradation of brand value, loss of revenue from site downtime and higher costs from bad traffic. The average hourly cost of an infrastructure failure is $ 100,000 and the average cost of a data breach is at $ 3.62 million. 

Eureka Chief Information Security Officer Sulaiman Razmik said: “Cyber security is a growing concern. Growing cyber space is one of the key aspects that is creating a huge exposure for cyber security personalities. It has however led to an increased number of vulnerabilities, new threat scenarios and an uprising of a number of threats.”

He noted that there are two emerging trends which are mainly the global platform taking in to consideration the seriousness of cyber security and many vendors getting the solutions in the cyber security space. Data centric cyber security is key to help organisations view their issues based on data. 

“Data centric cyber security consists of a framework that includes data, identity, network, platform and governance. One must decide wisely on the security expenditure. That is crucial. Apply defence in depth. You need to have multiple layers of protection,” highlighted Razmik.

Eureka Founder and CEO Dilendra Wimalasekere sharing Eureka’s services in terms of cyber security stated: “In 1996, we started as an ISP and we grew to be the best by 2001. In 2003 we thought of launching 24/7 techies and our company grew very rapidly. Lots of companies were then talking to us about digitalisation so in 2012 we launched Reapdigital. We have around 35,000 consumers that we have supported around the world and 2,500 companies in countries such as Sri Lanka, UK, US, Pakistan and so forth.” 

Pix by Ruwan Walpola